Good morning and congratulations for making it to another Friday. 

The Minnesota House has passed a bill that lets workers accumulate earned sick and safe time to take care of themselves or a loved one. MPR’s Dana Ferguson reports that under the proposal, an employee could earn up to one hour of time off for every 30 hours they work with a cap of 48 hours each year. So after six weeks, a worker could earn one 8-hour day off. After extensive debate the House passed the bill 69-54. It is also moving toward a vote in the Minnesota Senate. DFL leaders there, along with Gov. Tim Walz, have said they support it. The bill expands on existing sick and safe time standards and includes part-time workers under the program. And it sets a penalty for employers who fail to honor earned time off under specified conditions or who retaliate against workers who try to take their time off. Four Minnesota cities — Bloomington, Duluth, Minneapolis and St. Paul — have already adopted similar policies. As many as 900,000 Minnesota workers could benefit from the change. Supporters said the COVID-19 pandemic made clear the need to establish a pathway for workers to build up time to take off if they get sick or need to seek medical treatment. And they said that workers shouldn’t have to choose between caring for themselves and loved ones and their jobs. Republicans echoed concerns from Minnesota business groups that employers have the option to offer sick and safe time now and most work to accommodate providing time off as well as they can. And imposing a state mandate could be costly and difficult for small businesses to manage, they said.

More than 1 million Minnesota frontline workers who got payments from the state to reward their pandemic service are being reminded those bonuses are federally taxable. MPR’s Brian Bakst reports: The frontline bonuses that went to health care workers, grocery store employees, custodians and more were for $487.45 each. That payment is not subject to state taxes, but it is considered income for federal purposes. The IRS gave a reprieve last week to taxpayers in 21 states that made special tax rebates or disaster payments last year. Minnesota was not among them. “The IRS is aware of questions involving special tax refunds or payments made by certain states related to the pandemic and its associated consequences in 2022,” the federal tax department said in a news release. “A variety of state programs distributed these payments in 2022 and the rules surrounding their treatment for federal income tax purposes are complex. While in general payments made by states are includable in income for federal tax purposes, there are exceptions that would apply to many of the payments made by states in 2022.” The Minnesota Department of Revenue is sticking with guidance provided before the pandemic worker bonuses went out last fall. Recipients are being told to include it when filing federal forms for 2022.

There’s yet another problem with the oft-delayed and over budget Southwest light rail line. The Star Tribune has the story: Contractors working in the Kenilworth corridor recently encountered what appears to be a large piece of concrete about three feet away from the foundation of the Cedar Isles Condominiums, which were built in the 1980s from repurposed grain silos. This pinch-point in the narrow corridor between Lake of the Isles and Cedar Lake has long been a source of contention between condo residents and the Metropolitan Council, which is building the 14.5-mile extension of the Green Line. Already the most expensive public works project in state history, Southwest is more than $1 billion over budget and delayed nearly a decade, partly because of the difficulties associated with building the half-mile long tunnel. "We did encounter an impediment that we're trying to investigate," said Southwest's Project Director Jim Alexander at an advisory committee meeting earlier this month. "We're not quite clear what it is yet. This could be another delay that we have to experience."

Lawmakers have been working on a school funding fix that will be needed if the Senate follows the House’s lead and passes a bill to provide school meals at no cost to all students. MinnPost has the details: Without House File 1547, school districts that otherwise support universal school lunch might be nervous about making the change. That’s because districts across Minnesota — across the nation, really — use headcounts for free and reduced price lunch to qualify for hundreds of millions of extra school funding. That is, the free-and-reduced-price lunch metric has become a stand-in for measuring poverty levels in school districts and the individual schools within them. Specifically, that metric has been used to divide up $763 million each school year, so-called compensatory aid that makes up about 8.1 percent of public school funding in Minnesota. Rep. Sandra Feist, DFL-New Brighton, took on the task of replacing the old metric with a new one. She termed using free-and-reduced-price lunch recipients as a stand-in for poverty measures “a proxy and an imperfect one.” It has taken several months, but her bill moves the state into a new system for distributing compensatory money starting with the next school year.

And NPR reports on legal filings made public late Thursday afternoon as part of Dominion Voting System's $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News and its parent company: In the days and weeks after the 2020 elections, the Fox News Channel repeatedly broadcast false claims that then-President Donald Trump had been cheated of victory. Off the air, the network's stars, producers and executives expressed contempt for those same conspiracies, calling them "mind-blowingly nuts," "totally off the rails" and "completely bs" — often in far earthier terms. The network's top primetime stars — Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity — texted contemptuously of the claims in group chats, but also denounced colleagues pointing that out publicly or on television.

Tell MPR News: What do you hope lawmakers accomplish this session?