Senate Announces New Committee Structure and Chairs.  The Senate majority caucus announced its committee structure and chairs yesterday and there are a couple of surprises.  It wasn't entirely unexpected that there are more committees this year.  With such a large class of freshman elected in 2016, I expected that there would be a bit of restructuring to give as many of them chair responsibilities as could be sensibly managed.  Also, with Senators Tom Bakk and David Tomassoni breaking away from the DFL caucus and forming an independent caucus, the possibility existed that they would somehow be called upon to chair a committee and that did come to fruition with Bakk being named Chair of Capital Investment (Bonding) Committee and Tomassoni being named the Chair of the Higher Education Finance Committee.

While some of that may be surprising, the biggest surprise (at least to me) was the switching of Chairs between Senators Roger Chamberlain and Carla Nelson.  Senator Nelson has been the Chair of the Education Finance and Policy Committee for the past two years (Education Finance solely in 2017-2018) and Senator Chamberlain has been the Chair of the Tax Committee.  They will trade responsibilities in the coming biennium, with Nelson moving to Taxes and Chamberlain to Education Finance and Policy.  Senator Chamberlain has been a member of the education-related committees, but Senator Nelson did not serve on the Tax Committee during the last two biennia, but she did serve on the committee from 2013 to 2016.

Here is a link to the press release outlining the new committee structure and the chairs of each committee and subcommittee:  Senate Republicans Release Committee Structure and Chairs