MARSHALL — The Minnesota Legislature ended its session without passing a bonding bill or an omnibus tax bill Sunday night — and it’s left the future of several proposed projects in Marshall up in the air.

If the Legislature does not hold a special session to act on items like Marshall’s proposed sales tax extension, it could have a big impact on the Marshall Aquatic Center, city staff said Tuesday. The city had planned on using the revenue from the 0.5% sales tax to help pay for major pool renovations.

“We really, seriously have to go back to the drawing board on what our next steps are,” City Administrator Sharon Hanson told Marshall City Council members.

Marshall Parks Superintendent Preston Stensrud said the city is still striving to keep the Aquatic Center running, but pool leaks and aging equipment make it hard to say how long they’ll be able to do that.

“It’s tough. You don’t know what’s going to happen,” Stensrud said.

He said he’s been dealing with problems like ongoing repairs, and it wasn’t always easy to find needed parts.

“We keep fixing it minimally to keep it operational, but if we keep going down this path, we’re real close to needing a severe overhaul of several hundred thousand dollars to get back in the game a little bit,” Stensrud said.

The city needs legislative approval in order to put the question of whether to extend the sales tax before Marshall voters. If Marshall wanted to get the question on the ballot in this year’s general election, a special legislative session would need to be held before the end of August, Mayor Bob Byrnes said.

It’s not just the Aquatic Center facing an uncertain future, either. At Tuesday’s council meeting, council members heard about other state bonding requests that weren’t acted on before the end of session.

The Minnesota Emergency Response and Industrial Training (MERIT) Center had requested bonding dollars from the Legislature to continue developing its training facilities in Marshall, Marshall Public Safety Director Jim Marshall said.

“We received notice that the bonding bill that we were part of, the public safety part of it, was not approved at this point in time,” Marshall said. “We’ve had communication with Senator (Gary) Dahms and Representative (Chris) Swedzinski, and we’re still hopeful that we remain in that bonding bill.”

If the bill isn’t passed, Marshall said MERIT Center leadership would keep pushing forward with requests in future years.

A total of 7,200 people received training or attended meetings at the MERIT Center in Marshall in 2019, Marshall said.

Southwest West Central Service Cooperative, working together with Marshall Public Schools and Southwest Minnesota State University, had also requested bonding money to help build an alternative learning center to replace an existing facility in Belview. The proposal was to renovate a less-used building on the SMSU campus into space for students with special needs.

“Now we need to pivot. And our pivot as of this hour is uncertain. We still have the issue of financing whatever we’d want to do. We still have a need to move the Belview program out of that old elementary building into a suitable facility,” said SWWC Executive Director Cliff Carmody.

Carmody said the cooperative still wanted to work with local partners like SMSU and the city of Marshall as it looked for potential solutions.