Terri Bonoff

Your prompt replies to my previous questions have impressed me greatly! I am thoroughly supportive of all of your educational efforts and especially your early childhood positions. However, there are concerns about Minnesota's general position on child custody after divorce and I believe that the presumption of joint custody is not always in the best interests of the child. Of course it IS BEST when the parents both agree and are willing to compromise, but when they do NOT, it is best for one parent to have sole custody and for the other to have visitation. Ignoring the fact that some divorce cases DO have fault is not best for Minnesota's children or the agreived spouse. It is merely a convenience for the courts. There are cases when one parent terminates the family relationship for his or her own preference ( usually another love interest) and in this case, the other parent needs to maintain the children's home environment and should retain their residence and have basic decision making about their upbringing without having to "get permission" for every little thing from the abandoning parent. Let me say that I have been married to the same person for over 35 years and I am not an embittered spouse. However, I do counsel children with divorced parents frequently and I am concerned that the splitting up of the parenting responsibilities only works when both parents are in favor of the divorce and able to compromise. When one parent feels particularly damaged by emotional and financial abandonment, it seems to be an unfair and inflicts an unduly harsh punishment to force them to cooperate and closely share parenting with persons who have abandoned them and caused the dissolution of the family. After all, most marriage ceremonies of most faiths and even various sexual orientations involve a pledge of faithful commitment for life. That IS the entire POINT of a marriage. When someone breaks this pledge, There should be consequences.

The DFL tax increase proposals (senate or house versions) are draconian. There is not a bottomless pit of money out here. Minnesota has overspent and over promised for too many years. In the midst of a deep recession, raising income taxes, adding new brackets is not the answer. How come I have to adjust my budgets, but government continues to spend without regard to the people actually paying the bills?

The state's population is 6mm. 20% of the population is comprised of school-age children. The k-12 education budget is $14 billion. That equates to $12,000 for every student. I don't think that we taxpayers are being unreasonable by demanding that we see some results from the substantial amount of money we are already spending before we are willing to part with even more money for education. (After all, the average classroom of 12 kids is allocated revenues of 150 grand. Not bad.) If the additional money was targeted to programs that have been proven to work and to high-achieving students who will go on to be productive citizens, I might reconsider. This is never the case, however, as we continue to see more and more of our money being wasted on "statewide initiatives", "special ed", and "underperforming schools", which seem to turn in the same awful results no matter how much money we spend on them. (Iowa has half the population we do; they spend a quarter of what we do on education; their students' test scores have been slightly higher than ours. Someone please enlighten me on what I'm missing.) Our HHS budget is $10 billion. With a poverty rate of 10% (and with "poverty" being defined very generously by our parents' and grandparents' standards), that equates to $17,000 per impoverished PERSON (not family) in this state. I'll grant that a portion of the money is spent on others not included in the poverty category (which is another issue for debate, in my opinion), but the sums are still staggering. (Once again, with half the population, Iowa's HHS budget is one eighth the size of ours. That state has had a string of Democratic governors, not to mention their torrid love affair with our new president and their recent gay marriage bonanza, so you can hardly attribute their thrift to miserly conservatism.) Finally, Senator Bonoff, it's very clear that your party in both houses of the legislature is asking your constituents to shoulder a very disproportionate share of the burden for this latest financial crisis (as your party has done in every other financial crisis, for that matter). I hope you'll stand up to your party's leadership.

This has to do with Senator Ellen Anderson's recent comments that the Lessard Outdoor Heritage Council(LOHC) is not spending enough money in the Metro area. There was a Road Salt Symposium sponsored by the Freshwater Society in February. Several of the presentations given showed statistical evidence that Metro area wetlands, lakes, rivers, and streams are failing to meet EPA Clean Water standards due to chloride pollution. This pollution has also been found in at least 12 Metro shallow wells less than 50 feet deep meaning that this pollution is moving into our shallow acquifers. These levels are exceeding 250mg/liter of chloride. Senator Anderson also sits on the Legislative - Citizen Committee on Minnesota Resources(LCCMR) where they already are funding a Metro Habitat Corridors Project that deals specificly with habitat projects in the Metro area. Spending LOHC dollars in the Metro area would not be the best use of these funds due to the continued pollution by road salt.

These are very important issues that deserve careful analysis.