Prior to the start of the legislative break, the House and Senate committees with jurisdiction of Veterans policy passed separate budget bills with funding and policy items for MDVA, as well as the Minnesota Department of Military Affairs. The Governor had his own recommendations. All three must reconcile their differences prior to the constitutional adjournment date of May 17. The following will compare the similarities and differences between each proposal.

Veterans Homelessness Initiative
If enacted, this item would provide money to Veterans experiencing homelessness such as housing vouchers and other wraparound services. Each proposal funded this item at different amounts.

• Governor: $2.62 million over two years
• House: $2.475 million over two years
• Senate: $1.5 million over two years

Veterans Suicide Prevention
This funding would help MDVA with its goal of creating awareness and preventing suicide among Veterans. The funding would be used for personnel, training, research, 5.5 marketing, and professional or technical 5.6 contracts. All three proposals funded the initiative at $1.65 million over two years.

9/11 and Global War on Terror Task Force
All three proposals include funding for this initiative. Which would allow the task force to write and publish a definitive history of the conflicts that followed the September 11 attacks and host a remembrance marking 20 years since that fateful day.

• Governor: $500,000
• House: $400,000
• Senate: $112,000

Veterans Recreation Facilities
There is significant difference between the three proposals where the House funds three facilities, the Senate funds one and the governor made no recommendations.

• House: $253,000 between Camp Bliss in Walker, Veterans on the Lake in Ely and Disabled Vets Camp on Big Marine Lake
• Senate: $75,000 for Camp Bliss

Veterans Resilience Project
The House proposal included a $50,000 grant for this initiative which would provide eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) programming for Veterans and current service members. This was based off HF792 authored by Rep. Ryan Winkler of Golden Valley but with a lower level of funding than his proposal. The governor and Senate did not include this in their proposals.

Domiciliary Residents PNA Increase
The House along with the governor, proposed increasing the personal needs allowance for Veteran residents of the domiciliary program in Hastings and Minneapolis. Currently, the rate is $90, it would increase to $105 under the proposal. An increased hasn’t happened since 1996. The Senate did not include this change.

Policy Items
The House and Senate proposals both include the following policy item changes (no funding is necessary for enactment of the changes):

• Minnesota GI Bill technical changes
• Authorizing MDVA to provide adult day care services
• Authorizing MDVA to provide dental services to residents of Minnesota Veterans Homes
• Adding MDVA to the list of exempted agencies who can with external publicity representatives
• Adding “Prevention and” to Veterans Suicide Prevention and Awareness Day, which is observed on the first Saturday in October.
• Authorizing MDVA to establish a Veterans stable housing initiative for homeless Veterans. Allowing private data on individuals maintained in the Homeless Veteran Registry to be shared with members of the Minnesota Interagency Council on Homelessness and Homeless Veteran Registry partners to expedite the coordination of homeless efforts.

Additionally, the House proposal includes the bill language of HF478, the Veterans Restorative Justice Act.

After passing HF752 in the House Labor, Industry, Veterans and Military Affairs committee unanimously, the bill was re-referred to the Ways and Means committee. It will be heard in the next few weeks.

The Senate version, SF485 was also passed unanimously in the Veterans and Military Affairs committee. It was sent to the Finance committee and will be heard at a later date.