Joining us now, the co-chairs who have been working long hours here of higher education, we have Democrat Dan Wolgaman and Republican Marion Rarick.

Well, you two, that was a big vote.

It was bipartisan for but also bipartisan against, if I've got it right.

Who wants to talk about that, how you landed that?

- Well, governing in a tie is not easy.

In fact, I don't think anyone has ever been in the situation that Chair Rarick and I have been in where we have a perfectly tied committee and we share the gavel.

But I'm so proud of the work that we did together and really give credit to Chair Rarick for her leadership in this.

It's not easy coming together and having a bill that can get both through my caucus and her caucus obviously we come at it from very different points, but Through good faith negotiations and a lot of back-and-forth and I might add many cases of lemon and lime LaCroix We we that was that was the real secret to our success But no, we worked together in good faith.

We came up with this bill.

Not everyone in our caucus liked it.

I think that's the nature of a true compromise.

And I'm proud we were able to get that over the finish line.

- It's not an accomplishment.

Yeah, bipartisan in support and against.

- Yeah, absolutely.

And I think the sticking point was Mayo funding.

And we-- - The Rochester representatives voted against it, correct?

- That's correct.

So the Rochester representatives, not all of them, so Representative Quam did not vote against it.

But I think on the Democrat side, that was the Mayo funding that really was the sticking point for them.

And on the Republican side, it was a whole host of things.

Everything from just how campuses are conducting business, whether it's DEI or, you know, if you want to call it WOKE or whatever.

So there were all kinds of reasons on the Republican side why there were no votes.

How did you not get stuck in some of those political quagmire issues that people are just yelling at each other about across the rest of the country.

How did you avoid that?

Well, it wasn't easy and we did have a number of times where we'd kind of get in that quagmire and we would say, "Okay, we need to stop.

Let's, you know, let's retool.

Let's talk to our teams.

Let's come back."

It wasn't easy, but again, I think it was that determination that we recognized that the voters selected a tide house and they expect us to work together and do our job.

And so even when we got stuck, we came back and we get stuck and we'd come back and eventually we got the bill that you saw pass off the floor on Monday with 120 votes.

Inside baseball, did you have to just tell some people just simmer down like we gotta get this done behind the scenes?

Yeah, so I didn't on my side.

I mean, I kind of know where my members stand and interestingly enough, you know, we have lots and lots of huddles as you would imagine in the Republican caucus of the Higher Ed Committee and so we had been pre-caucusing and I knew exactly where they stood on everything and so I literally had the roadmap in front of me of what they wanted, what their priorities were, what they would kind of give in to.

So I had all of that in my notes as we move forward but I want to give credit to some of our staff.

We have the most amazing staff who came up with some great ideas when we did get stuck, and they actually helped move us forward.

So we have great staff here at the House of Representatives.

- And you had zero money to spend, as we heard earlier, and you had to backfill some cuts.

So explain, the grants was one of the tough areas.

- That's right, so even with the zero target, we sort of felt like we basically had a negative $239 million target because of the deficit with the state grant program.

And so a lot of our work was balancing out, okay, we have, we can do cuts to things to help backfill.

Yeah, what gets cut?

And then we have, we also have levers that we can use to sort of how we want to ration or make changes to the formula of the state grant program.

It was a combination of using both of those things where we were able to fix the state grant program even with a zero target.

- Yeah, talk about some of the cuts.

You mentioned Mayo, the higher ed part of Mayo.

What were some of the other cuts you had to make?

- Right, so in the University of Minnesota, they had a University of Minnesota and a Mayo partnership and essentially what it was was $16 million that were given to them and then they granted it out from there and we said, you know what, we don't really need them to do that for us.

We can do that kind of work and so that was $16 million.

- And you also said Mayo had money too.

Wasn't that part of some of the things you're saying about like executive pay, that who deserves it, who needs it, was that part of it?

- That's absolutely a part of it as well because we looked at just the gross revenue that Mayo had pulled in in the previous year and it was nearly $19 billion.

So we were trying to really prioritize which entities really needed the money and of course we prioritized students and families over anything else, that was the highest priority, is hold harmless the students and the families as much as possible.

What about the federal issues, the student visas, undocumented students, people in Minnesota getting removed from campus?

Did you touch to that, either of you?

- So we really didn't talk about that.

We did have one bill hearing that we heard as an amendment on the floor, saying that if you're here illegally, that you shouldn't get North Star Promise, which is the free college.

It's kind of baked into other areas of higher ed that you have to be a legal citizen here in order to get the vast majority of grants and scholarships in Minnesota.

And so it was just this one kind of outlier.

But we really didn't spend a lot of time on that.

We tried to talk about things that we could agree to.

And honestly, we did something historic that's never been done, which is we did the deepest dive ever on our budget.

We had every single, not only the University of Minnesota and Mid-State, but literally anybody that got money in any capacity come in and talk about how they spent the money and what they did with it.

And so we've never done that.

- I mean this in a really nice way.

I mean you guys geeked out.

You guys love to get into the minutiae, don't you, of government?

- Well, our predecessor, the previous chair of the House Higher Education Committee, Jean Polowski, had a motto for our committee, "Grab 'em by the budgets and don't let go."

And I really wanna credit Chair Eric for really fulfilling the spirit of that.

Because of our power sharing agreement, she had the gavel for many weeks before I did.

And for her to come in and set that standard of, you know, we're going line by line, we're asking specific questions, you know, you're getting this funding, what are you doing with it, show us your 990s, I mean, it was very thorough and I think really set us up in a successful position where when it did come down to crunch time, when we are pouring over these spreadsheets, boy, we had all the information line by line by line and then some, and that's a credit to Chair Eric's thoroughness.

- And to back up, you mentioned a program, But that's a program for free tuition for folks whose parents make less than 80,000.

That was preserved, held harmless?

- Correct, so North Star Promise was completely held harmless.

The Fostering Independence Grant, so the foster kids, they were held harmless.

Now we were told after we got back from break that there's an anticipation that they're gonna have a lot more take up the program, so we may need to work on some of that in the Senate.

But for the highest priority things, Child care grants, we held harmless.

Things that were really important to students, we held harmless.

- Yeah, and that's hard with zero target.

You mentioned the Senate, 'cause that's what's next.

How hard is it gonna be reconciling?

'Cause you maybe have a pre-comfereed bill, but now you have to go fight with Democrats over there, right?

- That's right.

Well, I think we're all kinda sitting on pins and needles waiting to see what our joint target is, because we're really limited in the work that we can do negotiating with our Senate counterparts until we know-- - And that'll happen above you, right?

- What our joint target is.

That's right.

And you know, for us, once we got our house target, whoosh, we sprung into action and started negotiating right away.

But you can only really just have, you can only be so productive in preliminary conversations until you get that joint target.

So we're waiting on pins and needles for that.

You know, we had a zero target.

The Senate had a $100 million target.

We're going to land somewhere in between there.

And that will, of course, dictate the kind of the battle lines, so to speak, of our negotiations.

- Thank you, we're out of time.

We'll keep watching it.

Appreciate it.