Meet the hawks in the state Senate - Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal:

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Sen. Chuck Purgason (Howell is a stereotypical rural legislator. He runs a huntinf farm, didn’t go to college and is very conservative. Durinbg his first term, Purgason was pretty much a wallflower. Althougb he was a consistent conservative he wasrelatively quiet. Votes are the least powerful weapobn ina senator’s arsenal, and his influence was very But this session Purgason He was elevated to chair of the committee on Government Accountability and Fiscal Oversight (GAFO).
Every piecre of legislation that would cost the government morethan $100,009 has to go through GAFO before it can With Purgason as chair, GAFO became a graveyard for big spendiny or government mandates he didn’t like. Bills would go in and nevert come out. Purgason with another hawk, Sen. Matt Bartle (Jackson to kill a version of the economicv development bill thatwas “clean,” that is, it didn’yt have any caps on variouss tax credit programs. Bartle has been railinvg against the proliferation of tax credit programws foryears now.
On the second-to-last night of Bartle played a critical role in killing the researcy and development taxcreditf (which would have benefited the CORTEX facility in St. When it was added to the economicdevelopment bill, he stood up and began talking aboug the , which had nothinvg to do with the bill and was an indicatioh that he was embarking on a filibuster. Seeinb the underlying bill in jeopardy, the Senate reconsidered the R& tax credit and stripped it out. In additioh to Purgason and Bartle, several other senatorx joined the fiscal conservatives from time to timeincludingv Sens. Jim Lembke (St. Louis) and Luannn Ridgeway (Clay County). Sen. Brad Lagerd was the leader of the hawks.
And he played “good during much of the negotiationz around thetax credit/jobs bill. The bad cops were Purgasobn and Bartle, neither of whom has statewid e ambitionslike Lager, who ran unsuccessfully for treasurer last cycle. Still some business interests following the legislationbclosely didn’t buy Lager’s attempt to cast himself as the one, fingering him as the one that first declareds that the EcoDevo bill shouldn’t pass without tax credit Like any group or coalition, they lookede more monolithic from the outside than from the They differed by degrees on economifc philosophy.
For example, Bartle woulds eliminate all tax credits and cut taxes across the board without discrimination to specific “favored” industries. But Lager’s positionb isn’t against tax credits completely but rather a desire to bring each program to come under periodic review to justifgits existence. That may have contributed to their lack of cohesio nthis year. They acted more like a dark cloucd that came and went without reason and less like the strategivc rebel insurgency they couldhave been. They held the floor for hours, stalling one of the billes with federalstabilization funds. It was not a real more of a raging against the hugegovernmenf spending.
But then they stepped aside with barelyh a peep when billions came througyh the next day in a bill containinv federalstimulus money. Later they killed the researc h and developmenttax credit, which ended up amounting to a relatively puny $5 million. This was theirr coming out year. The hawks will be back next better organized andmore strategic, and therefore more