Usual suspects funding the lottery constitutional amendment

The main group advocating for the new amendment calls itself Minnesotans for the Great Outdoors. The organization boasts of a long list of entities supporting the effort. But of more importance is who is donating money to the cause.

To advocate for the amendment, the group formed a political fund under the same name last year. As of September 17, the group had raised $588,000 but had spent less than a tenth of that amount, $53,000 supporting the ballot initiative. The previous year (2023), the group spent $45,000 on public opinion polling.

The largest single donor to the fund is Alida Messinger, the Rockefeller oil heiress and former wife of the former governor Mark Dayton. She gave $200,000.

Another $200,000 was donated by the left-wing advocacy group Conservation Minnesota.

The actual spending of these lottery dollars is directed by a very odd government entity called the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR). This board includes sitting members of the state legislature and citizens appointed by the governor and the legislature. The LCCMR employs a full-time staff.

As the Commission drifted towards funding projects with more of a political and ideological bent, conflicts inevitably arose between the branches of government.

Two of these projects have received nominations for our Golden Turkey award, one in 2020 and again in 2021.

in a previous life, I worked directly for the last Republican to hold the office of Governor of Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty, and witnessed this firsthand:

As reported by the St. Paul Pioneer Press at the time (2010):

Last year, Pawlenty vetoed two LCCMR projects, and, in a letter Tuesday, the governor tried to put his imprint on the conference committee’s product, saying some projects are of questionable constitutionality and were given poor rankings from the LCCMR itself.

The bill is an annual product that uses lottery money from the Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund.

That process — where the LCCMR recommends projects, a bill is created and debated at the legislature, and the governor approves or vetoes the final product — is done away with in the new constitutional amendment.