Sen. Gary Dahms and Rep. Chris Swedzinski gave a session wrap-up and took questions from area residents at a Thursday town hall meeting in Marshall.

MARSHALL — Minnesota legislators were working right down to the wire at this year’s session. However, area legislators said Thursday that they weren’t happy with the outcome of the last-minute rush.

Sen. Gary Dahms said Democratic legislators had passed a massive bill in the final hours of the session.”Nobody knows what’s in it,” he said. A version of the bill on the Minnesota Revisor’s website said it covered a list of topics including financing state government; rental assistance; licensure for veterinary technicians; the creation of a state Office of Emergency Medical Services; and more.

Dahms, R-Redwood Falls, showed area residents a thick stack of papers bound with rubber bands. He said it was the conference committee report on the bill, Minnesota House File 5247.

“This started out to be about a 50 page tax bill,” Dahms said of the pile. It was now more than 1,400 pages long, he said.

The bill was just one of the things Dahms and Rep. Chris Swedzinski, R-Ghent, touched on at a series of town hall meetings in area cities Wednesday and Thursday. In Marshall, area residents asked about subjects like state bonding and new paid leave rules.

Dahms talked about the process that led to the 1,400-page bill getting passed at the end of the session. As the session got down to its last couple of days, Democratic lawmakers were focused on reaching a deal on pay standards for Uber and Lyft drivers, Dahms said. “So then of course as Sunday comes along, we’re in a tough spot because they’ve got a bunch of bills they want to pass, but not the time to pass them. About eight o’clock Sunday night, they called the conference committee for the Tax Committee back together and said, ‘We’re gonna use your tax bill as a vehicle bill to pick up nine other bills.'”

“So there was nine more bills that went into this piece right here,” Dahms said. “Four of those bills had not had hearings, either in the House or the Senate. Five of those bills had a hearing either in the House or the Senate, but were never on the floor. Then they went through in the cutting room and picked up bits and pieces of bills that they couldn’t get passed . . . So at 20 minutes after 11:00, this bill shows up to be passed.”

Dahms said the massive bill was passed in 20 minutes.

“We have a rule in the Senate that says it has to be a single subject omnibus bill. And this is not a single subject,” he said. “We don’t know if somebody will challenge this in court or not. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

Swedzinski said other legislative changes, like sick and safe leave requirements, would also have negative effects on businesses.

“From a business community standpoint, from a cost-of-business standpoint, you know, there’s a lot of increases in mandates,” Swedzinski said.

“With the paid family leave, that bill was brought back to get some work done, but the things that we felt needed to be worked out didn’t get worked out,” Dahms said.

Swedzinski said the paid family leave bill would carry “hidden costs.”

“When this program comes out, and you have 12 weeks to potentially utilize to help family members or whatever, and then you can’t necessarily backfill that employee while they’re gone, we’re going to multiply the amount of people we have to actually work the hours,” Swedzinski said. “If people can fundamentally just be gone and have no real incentive to come back because it’s a state right, we’re essentially getting rid of a third, or a fifth, or a sixth or an eighth of the workforce through a government program.”

One audience member asked why legislators did not pass a bonding bill this year.

Normally, the House and Senate majority each put together their own bonding bills with input from the minority, and then work out the differences before the bill moves forward, Dahms said.

“This year, the House never put together a bill and put it on the floor to have it voted on,” he said. “In the Senate, there was a bill put together, but they had no input from the minority. So when that bill came to the Finance Committee, we got it tabled so that we could get some of our projects into that bill. There were very few rural projects.”

Dahms said none of the 15 bonding projects in his district had made it into the Senate bonding bill. “But it didn’t make much difference, because the House never sent the bill.”

“I’m pretty sure there will be a bonding bill next year. However, I was pretty sure there would be a bonding bill this year,” Dahms said.

Dahms and Swedzinski said there were some positive highlights from this year’s session. Dahms said a religious exemption, protecting religious organizations and schools against claims of gender identity discrimination, was added back into the Minnesota Human Rights Act.

“That was just one of the big issues that a lot of people paid attention to,” Swedzinski said.

Dahms said negotiations by a group of religious leaders helped make progress on the exemption.

“It was really amazing to watch these church leaders come in, sit down at the table, and really worked hard and did a great job of negotiating,” he said.

Marty Seifert said he wanted to thank Swedzinski and Dahms for their support of a bill that included $24 million to help fund rural emergency medical services. “For this area, it was very important for us,” Seifert said.