With Minnesota facing a $6.2 billion budget deficit, the top priority this session, besides balancing our budget, will be job creation.

The logic behind this is very simple. If we can put more people to work in Minnesota, more people will be paying income taxes as well as sales taxes because they’ll be buying more goods with their newfound income. As income and sales tax revenues increase, our projected budget deficit will decrease.

The first two bills offered in the Minnesota House this year reflect the need for job creation and fiscal sanity. House File 1 would streamline Minnesota’s cumbersome and often confusing permitting process for those looking to expand their businesses in our state, and House File 2 would force Minnesota to adopt a priority based budgeting standard.

To me, priority-based budgeting is just good common sense. Business owners start their budgeting process from ground zero all the time to make sure their operation is running efficiently. When you consider state spending continues to rapidly outpace incoming revenue, there’s no reason why state government shouldn’t establish a set of funding priorities and eliminate programs that are duplicative or have already met their goals.

Specifically, the bill I’m co-authoring would require the Legislative Commission on Policy and Fiscal Planning to set budget priorities for enacting a priority-based biennial budget beginning with the budget for fiscal years 2014 and 2015. It would also force an audit of other state agencies and policy boards to determine whether or not they should be abolished, reorganized or continued.

The ultimate goal of the legislation is to reset how we balance the budget by aligning spending to priorities and results, and determining the ongoing need for state government programs. For too long, lawmakers have accepted that government programs should automatically receive funding increases every year without actually reviewing a program’s effectiveness or analyzing its base amount of funding. With Minnesota facing a $6.2 billion budget deficit, the business-as-usual method is no longer acceptable. You can’t spend what you don’t have, so it’s clear to me that funding priorities need to be established at the state level.

It’s also clear that new state business permitting guidelines also need to be established. We’ve heard from a number of companies who wanted to expand in Minnesota but ultimately didn’t because it may have taken longer than one year to secure a permit. Instead of rolling out the welcome mat for these job providers we’ve been scaring them away, which is why we need to take action.

Some of the permitting changes in House File 1 would include establishing a 150-day goal for the MPCA and DNR to issue permits; eliminating district court review of environmental review decisions with challenges going directly to the Court of Appeals; allowing an applicant to prepare a draft environmental impact statement rather than a state agency or local unit of government and requiring that final decisions on permits be made within 30 days of the final approval of an EIS.

With our state in great need of job providers, we can no longer continue to bog down the permitting process. We need a process that is user-friendly and efficient, and by enacting this legislation we will remove another barrier that hinders job creation and economic recovery in Minnesota.

Have a question or concern? Constituents in District 27A including communities in Freeborn and Mower counties can write to me at 439 State Office Building, 100 Rev Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., St. Paul, MN 55155. Or call me at 651-296-8216 or e-mail me at rep.rich.murray@house.mn.

Rich Murray, R-Albert Lea, is the state representative for House District 27A.