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Committee considers maintaining county feedlot grants; amendment adopted and bill laid over
Summary
House File 1846 would maintain a base appropriation for delegated county feedlot programs at $2,959,000 and increase the minimum grant to $10,000 per county; the committee adopted an author's amendment to correct the dollar amount and increase county minimums, heard testimony from county feedlot officers and the MPCA, then laid the bill over.
Vice Chair Burkel presented House File 1846 to maintain base funding for the county feedlot program and offered an author's (A1) amendment correcting the dollar amount to $2,959,000 and increasing the minimum per-county grant from $7,500 to $10,000. The committee adopted the A1 amendment by voice vote.
Mark Kipp (Kep in the transcript), county feedlot officer in Douglas County and president of the Minnesota Association of County Feedlot Officers, testified that delegated county staff register, inspect and permit many of the state's feedlots and serve as the first point of contact for producers. He said delegated counties oversee roughly 13,000 feedlots across 50 counties, representing about two-thirds of the state's feedlots. Kipp told the committee that funding was cut in the early 2010s and had only recently been increased; local workloads and costs have grown while funding pressure remains.
Tom Johnson, government relations director for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA), thanked the committee and noted the MPCA recognizes the need for funding. Johnson warned the committee of a drafting nuance: language passed in 2023 intended as a one-time appropriation was written into statute as an ongoing base amount of $2,959,000; the governor's budget proposed a $1,000,000 reduction. The MPCA indicated it could provide more detail on how other counties are funded and how the program is administered when not delegated.
Representative Purcell asked how delegated counties differ from the 37 counties that are not delegated and how the non-delegated counties are funded. Director Johnson replied that when counties are not delegated the MPCA administers the program for those counties, typically funded by permit fees deposited in the environmental fund and appropriated by the legislature.
After discussion, Vice Chair Burkel closed and renewed her motion that House File 1846, as amended, be laid over; the committee laid the bill over for possible inclusion in a future omnibus bill.
Key elements discussed: (1) base amount to maintain $2,959,000 for delegated county feedlot grants; (2) adjustment to raise the minimum county grant from $7,500 to $10,000 in the A1 amendment; (3) MPCA note that the $2,959,000 had been intended by some parties as a one-time appropriation in 2023 but is currently coded as base-line language; (4) governor's budget shows a proposed $1,000,000 reduction to the appropriation. Committee members emphasized the local value of county-level presence for producer education and compliance.
