The crop art competition has been part of the Minnesota State Fair since 1965 and has grown in popularity both in the number of entries and the level of interest by Fair visitors. In 2025, there were 451 pieces submitted to the Fair and it’s not unusual to have to stand in a substantial line to see the entries. You may not know that several people affiliated with the Legislature have contributed entries in the last few years.

The Library invites you to our space on the third floor of the Minnesota Senate Building (room 3238) for a chance to view crop art up-close, and with no line! 

A current legislator and several current and former legislative staff have selected works on display: 

• Charlotte Ferlic, House Research Department
• Rep. Athena Hollins
• Joel Alter, former evaluator at the Office of the Legislative Auditor
• Jennifer Nelson, MMB and former House staff
• Elaine Settergren, Legislative Reference Library

The exhibit is open now and runs through early January 2026. Current hours are posted on the library's hours and locations page.

The image seen here is a piece by Charlotte Ferlic in 2024.

Tribal casinos in Minnesota operate under a combination of federal, state, and tribal laws. In 1988, the United States Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, to regulate gambling on Indian land while promoting tribal economic development, self-sufficiency, and strong tribal governments.

In 1989, Minnesota Statute 3.9221 was passed authorizing the Governor to enter into gambling compacts with the eleven sovereign tribal nations. These eleven compacts detail operational aspects such as game types, regulatory oversight, and enforcement provisions. However, the state does not receive a share of casino revenues. Minnesota Statute 3.9221 also mandates a Report to the Legislature on the Status of Indian Gaming containing “information on compacts negotiated, and an outline of prospective negotiations.”

Minnesota has also expanded this cooperative model beyond gaming to include medical and recreational cannabis commerce on tribal lands.  Minnesota Statute 3.9224 authorizes medical cannabis compacts, while Minnesota Statute 3.9228 addresses adult-use recreational cannabis. So far, three tribes, the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, the Prairie Island Indian Community, and the White Earth Nation have negotiated cannabis tribal-state compacts.

These compacts reflect a trend of acknowledging tribal sovereignty while building collaborative regulatory frameworks between the state and tribal nations.

Please contact us with questions, for research assistance, or to borrow any books and reports: library@lrl.mn.gov or 651-296-8338.

Martin Sabo may be best known for his long service in the U.S. House of Representatives, or for being one of the founders and leaders of the National Conference of State Legislatures. But a new book by Lori Sturdevant, Martin Sabo: The Making of the Modern Legislature, focuses primarily on his time at the Minnesota Legislature. Sabo was first elected in 1960, went on to serve as House minority leader from 1969-1972, and then served as Speaker of the House from 1973-1978. This period of time saw dramatic and lasting changes at the Legislature.

The period between 1967 and 1975 are often regarded as the beginning of the modern era at the Minnesota Legislature. It was a time of new openness in government, more complete committee record keeping, and the return of party designations. The Legislature as an institution expanded and professionalized, and this era saw the creation of the House Research Department (1967), Senate Counsel (1968), the Legislative Reference Library (1969), and the Office of the Legislative Auditor (1973).

Many state laws that we take as givens were established during this era as well. For example, in 1973, the Legislature established a state minimum wage, created data privacy standards, and set up environmental requirements for large-project developers. And in 1975, Minnesota passed the Clean Indoor Air Act, the first state in the nation to pass such a law, despite Sabo’s habit of smoking heavily, including at the Speaker’s rostrum!

If these fundamental changes to the Legislature as an institution and formative changes to state law had a founding father, Sturdevant asserts that it is Martin Sabo. She argues that we have him to thank for our modern legislative era, with his humble leadership strategies, his interest in working across the aisle, his shoe leather campaign style, his “keen mind and good heart,” and his pursuit to professionalize the institution.

The Library has several other books related to this time of legislative and public policy changes:

Minnesota’s Miracle: Learning from the Government that Worked by Tom Berg, University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

Minnesota Standoff: The Politics of Deadlock by Rod Searle, Alton Press, 1990.

Please contact us with questions, for research assistance, or to borrow any of these books: library@lrl.mn.gov or 651-296-8338.

Each year, the Legislative Research Librarians staff section of the National Conference of State Legislatures recognizes excellence in state government publishing through the Notable Document Awards. Legislative librarians and others are invited to submit documents from their states for consideration. Minnesota's strong publishing reputation - from all three branches of government - means that Minnesota documents are often recognized for their excellence and contribution to the public policy publishing landscape. This year two Minnesota documents received a Notable Document Award, including one from the Legislature's own House Research Department, an office with a robust publishing history.

Major State Aids and Taxes: A Comparative Analysis from the House Research Department, along with its supplemental interactive tool, was recognized this year for its excellence in presenting a comparative analysis of the major state aids and taxes in Minnesota. Published regularly since 1982, the report is rich in charts, graphs, and numbers. The supplemental interactive tool significantly enhances its usefulness, allowing legislators to use the data lookup tool to create clear data visualizations comparing their legislative district or county with other parts of the state. The report was recognized for creating a resource that might serve as a good model for other policy areas where legislators rely heavily on data and policy analysis in their work. Congratulations to House Research for this recognition!

Another report recognized by the Notable Document Award team this year came from the legislatively-created Psychedelic Medicine Task Force. As cities and states have been considering decriminalization of psychedelic and other recreational drugs in recent years, the Legislature convened this task force in 2023 to study these policy questions, and specifically whether to allow the use of psychedelics as medicine to treat conditions like PTSD, alcohol use disorder, depression, and others. The group issued their heavily researched report in 2025: Psychedelic Medicine Task Force: Legislative Report.

There is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, a book on housing insecurity and homelessness, follows five families in Atlanta as they struggle to remain housed. The stories center on a sliver of the population who are struggling with housing despite full time employment.

The author of There is No Place for Us asserts that part of the housing insecurity problem is the way homelessness is defined and counted. Those who live in cars, in hotels or motels, or doubled-up with another family are not considered homeless in the federal Housing and Urban Development official counts.

In Minnesota, Wilder Research conducts a single-night count of homelessness across the entire state every three years and their data does include those who are not in a formal shelter. The most recent report is a count from 2023, which concluded that 10,522 people experienced homelessness in Minnesota in a single night. One-third of those experiencing homelessness in Minnesota are not in a formal shelter.

A new report by Wilder, focuses on an aspect of that same 2023 count: Homelessness Among Adults 55+ in Minnesota. More older adults in Minnesota are now experiencing homelessness than ever before; there were 1,204 adults in this category counted in their single-night count.

Minnesota has many programs for people who are experiencing homelessness, including seven state-funded, Department of Human Services (DHS)-administered programs. For a list of the seven programs, see Minnesota House Research Department’s publication: Programs and Services for People Experiencing Homelessness.

One of the DHS-administered programs is the Homeless Youth Act, which was established at DHS in 2006. Their 2025 mandated report discusses the estimated 13,300 youth who experience homelessness over the course of a year and the programs available to this population of Minnesotans.