I got an email today from Representative Aaron Peterson. (Not a personal email – I’m sure I’m on a list of some sort.) Anyways, he said that the primary focus of this shorter session will be to create badly needed jobs for Minnesotans.

Here are two other quotes from the email:

In the early weeks of the session, the Legislature will pass a bonding bill, funding work projects across the state that will create as many as 10 thousand jobs. The top three priorities for this bill are local roads and bridges, higher education and clean water – which includes wastewater treatment, according to Rep. Peterson. Special emphasis will be given to jobs that are ready to go immediately.

Another priority for this session will be to pass another transportation bill; last year’s was vetoed by the Governor.

“The roads and bridges in our state are in deplorable condition,” said Peterson. “We need to make them safer for people to travel on, and also make sure goods and services can get around the state easily. In addition, a transportation bill will create more jobs.”

I’m not picking on Rep Peterson; I think the session priorities were a joint decision, but… Hello?! What about broadband? Wouldn’t building a statewide fiber network create a lot of jobs? Wouldn’t providing funding to help people learn to use broadband create a whole lot of different types of jobs? And once we had broadband – wouldn’t that help people create home-based jobs, encourage relocating business to come to Minnesota, and generally help lots of people work more easily from home – which might mean getting a job based in a different state or country but letting them remain in Minnesota?

And on the road issue – well clearly our bridges are in embarrassingly (and tragically) sad shape – but wouldn’t creating a superhighway (to use a 1994 analogy) reduce the number of daily commuters? If folks could work more effectively from home I think businesses would entertain the idea more readily – after all it saves them a lot of overhead and opens up the market from which to hire when location is no longer an issue.

OK I know I’m preaching to the choir and I know I’ve brought up these topics before – but to celebrate the start of the legislature I thought I’d bring ‘em up again.