This will come as no surprise to folks who attend the monthly Minnesota Broadband Task Force meetings (or who read the notes) where the repealing the tax exemption has been a big topic – but the St Cloud Times is reporting…

The chairwoman of Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton’s Broadband Task Force has echoed Republican criticism of a new state sales tax on telecommunications equipment.

Margaret Anderson Kelliher, a former Minnesota House speaker, said the tax could be an obstacle to new broadband infrastructure and lead to fewer jobs in that sector. She has written to Dayton about the tax and told Minnesota Public Radio News that the tax should be repealed.

Kelliher is a Democrat and currently directs the Minnesota High Tech Association. She argues the tax will make it harder to reach a state goal of having border-to-border broadband by 2015. The tax moves in the opposite direction of a task force recommendation to expand an exemption so it would cover more types of telecommunications equipment, such as fiber-optic cable.

“This I think is a case where being able to correct this and take it back and make it the way it had been for about a decade or more, makes a lot of sense,” Kelliher said.

It’s a tough time to increase tax cuts so we’ll see what happens. One of the Task Force members had an alternative recommendation – collect the tax but earmark a portion of it for the Office of Broadband Development. That might be an innovative way to help get to the state broadband goals.