House Speaker: Budget Bills Weeks Ahead of Schedule

ST. PAUL - With the State Legislature on Easter/Passover break, the Speaker of the House is doing a media tour to talk about how the session has gone so far.

Republican Kurdt Daudt tells WJON, with this being a budget year, all of the budget bills are on track.

Where we are right now is basically we've passed all of our budget bills out of the house and senate.  They will go now to conference committee where we'll work out the differences.  We hope to engage the Governor in that process as well.

Daudt says he's hoping to avoid waiting until the final days, and hours, of the session to get the bills passed.

Just to give some perspective, we're about three weeks ahead of our normal schedule. And we've done that very intentionally to allow more time at the end, so things don't get bunched up at the end.

Daudt says another high priority bill during this session is passing REAL ID. And, other items on his "wish list" include bills dealing with job creation, and lowering health care costs. He says he's also open to getting a bonding bill passed this year too.