Steve’s Legislation

Steve is analytic by nature and doesn’t mind being called a “Policy Wonk”. He is an economist by education and spent much of his information technology career analyzing data and designing decision support systems to help policymakers in both the public and private sectors make better policy decisions. He loves researching issues and developing legislation to solve problems. House Majority Leader Ryan Winkler once introduced Steve at an event by telling his audience that, in all of his years in the House, he'd never seen another legislator who was so willing to take on difficult issues and research them thoroughly before crafting thoughtful, well considered legislation with bipartisan appeal – most of Steve’s bills have Republican Senate authors.

A few of Steve’s more significant legislative initiatives are described below. He doesn’t wait for lobbyists to bring him bills — these are all bills that he’s researched and developed himself, sometimes in collaboration with lawmakers from other states.

Local Initiatives

The least that you should expect from any State Legislator is that they support their City and their School Board in their efforts to secure State funding for their capital projects that are of regional significance and to secure State authority to pursue their policy initiatives. Steve has been in service to the City for over 25 years and has always enjoyed a strong partnership with its City Council and staff.

City of Bloomington

Steve has been an active advocate for the inclusion of Bloomington’s requests for funding to replace its aging and obsolete Public Health facility, modernize the Bloomington Ice Garden and to expand the performing arts space at the Bloomington Center for the Arts in the Legislature’s biennial Bonding Bill (which has not passed, this year).

Steve successfully passed a bill for the City, this year, which grants the City’s Housing & Redevelopment Authority the ability to expand the membership of its governing board in the interest of improving its diversity — this was one of the few standalone bills to pass into law, this year!

Bloomington Public Schools

Steve collaborated with fellow economist Rep Jennifer Schulz on a bill that would require the State to build inflation into its baseline budget, including the K-12 Education budget (which is the largest component of the State General Fund budget). Our Schools should not have to scratch and claw for inflationary increases to their basic education funding formula every two years.

Steve also strongly supported the House proposal to completely fund Special Education services from the State budget surplus to relieve Bloomington’s School Board and property taxpayers the burden of funding special ed from local property tax levies.

Traffic Safety

Steve has been working to improve the safety of our neighborhood streets since he was a Bloomington City Councilmember. Because the biggest complaint he was hearing from residents was about speeding in residential neighborhoods, Steve spent countless hours researching solutions at the MNDOT library in St Paul and discovered the concept of “Road Diets” — conversions of four-lane streets to three-lane streets with bike shoulders. He successfully pursued reforms to MNDOT street design standards to make it easier for Bloomington to make these conversions and, because of Steve’s research and advocacy, they are now the standard configuration for our neighborhood collector streets, resulting in lower speeds and improved safety for motorists, pedestrians and cyclists.

As a freshman legislator in 2019, Steve was able to build upon this work to pass a bill enabling cities like Bloomington to also reduce the speed limits on these streets, which the City is now exploring. Other cities have already taken advantage of this authority to reduce their speed limits on some (Edina) or all of their streets (Minneapolis and St Paul). Steve is now working to secure the same authority for counties so that speed limits could also be reduced on roads like Normandale, France, Penn and Old Shakopee Rd. Steve recently took a MNDOT course in basic street design, including concepts such as “design speed”, so that he could have better-informed discussions with traffic engineers about speed limit policy.

Transportation Options

A transportation economist by education, Steve has been deeply involved in local, regional and state transportation policy for decades, and is recognized as one of the State’s leading transportation policy experts. As a member of the House Transportation Committee, Steve is working to secure funding for a balanced, multi-modal transportation system and for the electrification of the vehicle fleet to combat climate change.

In 2021 Steve secured a State funding appropriation for the 494 Corridor Commission’s Commuter Services group which enabled them to offer teleworking program support to Bloomington employers both during and following the pandemic.

While Chair of the National League of Cities Transportation Committee and Bloomington’s representative on the 35W Solutions Alliance board in 2010, Steve was instrumental in securing federal funding for the creation of the 35W MNPass Lanes, which also laid the groundwork for the “Orange Line” Bus Rapid Transit line, which he began lobbying for as a Planning Commissioner in 1998. Over the course of 20 years, Steve actively worked to see it funded as a Bloomington City Councilmember, as Bloomington’s representative on the Metropolitan Council and as Bloomington’s representative in the State Legislature, which provided the final funding to build the project in 2019.

Steve’s advocacy work related to the 35W/494 interchange reconstruction, the westbound on-ramp to 494 at Bush Lake Rd and the addition of MNPass Lanes to 494 also stretches back decades.

Statewide Initiatives

In addition to his work directly on behalf of Bloomington and its residents, Steve also makes time to take on complex issues of statewide — and sometime national — importance affecting every Minnesota resident. Other legislators look to Steve for information and advice as they are drafting their own bills on these topics:

Health Care

Steve’s work in health care builds upon his experience in economics and healthcare informatics. Steve believes that you should have the right to know how much your healthcare and drugs are going to cost before you agree to pay for them. The cost of healthcare is the leading cause of personal bankruptcy and there is literally no price competition in the market for healthcare services. A particular radiology scan might cost $250 in one hospital and $1250 at another hospital 5 miles down the road.

One of Steve’s bills (HF57) would require Minnesota hospitals to publish their prices in a consistent, legible format to make it easy for organizations like Turquoise Health to create price comparison tools that would allow you to shop for the best price on these services. Steve’s work on hospital pricing transparency has led to his appointment as the Chair of a federal task force convened by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that would establish a nationwide standard for the publication of this data. This task force is about to finalize its recommendations, which would take effect next year.

Another of Steve’s bills (HF58) would require drug manufacturers to publish their prices, as well, so that you could see, for example, that Dupixent, which you see advertised on TV every night, costs $32,000 a year. This same bill would also prevent health plans from forcing you off a drug that’s working for you in the middle of the year just so that they can earn a larger rebate from a different drug manufacturer. He is currently working on a bill that would require health plans and their pharmacy benefit managers to pass on all manufacturer drug rebates to patients in the form of discounts at the pharmacy counter.

Housing

Building on Steve’s 20+ years of local government experience, He has authored a comprehensive regulatory reform bill which addresses the exclusionary zoning practices that prevent the construction of starter homes for a new generation of young families and sustain segregated housing patterns in many wealthy suburbs (HF3256).

The StarTribune’s big expose on Exclusionary Zoning, last summer, set the stage for this bill. His own 2019 “Flaming Hoops” commentary described the fiscal roots of the problem. Peter Callaghan’s take on his bill in MinnPost provides a good overview.

Steve is proud of Bloomington’s progressive affordable housing policies. Bloomington has always allowed duplexes in single-family neighborhoods, and you see them sprinkled unobtrusively throughout western Bloomington neighborhoods. Bloomington’s longstanding housing policies are the model for several of the provisions in the bill.

Steve has just been named Legislator of the Year by Housing First for his zoning reform initiative, which has been described as the most comprehensive such bill in the country.

Data Privacy

Residents of California and a few other states enjoy personal data privacy protections that we do not. One of Steve’s bills (HF1492) would extend these rights to Minnesota residents. Steve is collaborating with state legislators in a number of other states on shared legislative language that would enhance these rights, especially for locational data privacy (companies have so many ways to track your whereabouts!), and would strengthen corporate responsibility for the protection of your data. Steve recently spoke about his contributions to this effort at a national legislative conference on consumer data privacy and is already working on the 2023 version of this bill.

Electrification of the Vehicle Fleet

In Minnesota, the transportation sector is the single largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, surpassing even the electric power industry. Steve has been a strong advocate for efforts to promote the electrification of both our transit fleet and our personal vehicles.

As an alternative to Republican efforts to impose punitive vehicle registration surcharges on electric vehicles, Steve has authored a bill that would establish a fair mileage-based road user charge on electric vehicles that would be equivalent to the gas tax paid by other vehicles, without violating the locational data privacy of EV owners (HF523). Steve spoke on this topic at two national legislative gatherings this summer and convinced the Republican Chair of the MN Senate Transportation Committee to give his bill a hearing next year. He has just been appointed to a National Conference of State Legislators Steering Committee for a NCSL study of the future of road user charges.

State Information Technology Reform

As a member of the bicameral, bipartisan legislative information technology caucus, Steve has been a participant in the Governor’s Blue Ribbon Council on Information Technology reform and its successor, the Technical Advisory Committee, which includes representatives of both state government agencies and the private sector.

Steve was instrumental in the successful conversion of the failed MNLARS driver and vehicle services system to the successful new MNDRIVE system by providing information technology advice and by correcting contradictions in existing state law that made MNLARS impossible to program.

Steve regularly provides advice to his legislative colleagues on how to address any IT challenges inherent to their bills and coaches them on how to present those aspects of their bills in hearings.

Steve has been invited to speak at the annual “TechNet” state technology policy conference in November about the future of transportation technology.