Lobbyists and lobbying organizations spent $18.9 million to influence Minnesota politics in 2023. Of that, $1.4 million or 7.5% percent came from lobbyists from Xcel Energy, the largest amount spent by a single organization that year. The utility is one of 15 top-spending companies that made up over half of all lobbying spending that year, along with other lobbyist organizations representing the education, pharmaceutical, and health care industries, among others.
Minnesota’s state government tracks lobbying through its Campaign Finance Board, which requires lobbyists and the businesses they represent to regularly report their lobbying activities. Recent changes to the state’s lobbying laws resulted in more stringent rules for lobbyist registration but laxer ones for reporting: More lobbyists are required as of 2024 to register with the state and report what issues they worked on, but they don’t have to report how much they spend in the process. That responsibility is now placed on the companies they work for, which are required to report the total amount spent in March of each year. While we don’t have access to spending totals for 2024 yet, CFB lobbyist filings do give us details on which issues lobbyists represented.
Looking at the Minnesota CFB’s lobbying report databases from 2023 and 2024, MinnPost analyzed which companies have spent the most lobbying state legislators and administrators and what bills, issues, and procedures they put their lobbyists to work on. Our totals for 2023 represent the sum of lobbying disbursements from all individual lobbyists working on behalf of a given company that year, including both employed and contracted lobbyists:
Xcel Energy's lobbyists spent $1.4 million throughout 2023. Most of that went toward cases before the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission. The state's PUC is where energy companies participate in the years-long process of setting future energy rates and pricing structures. Xcel had an active presence in committee proceedings throughout 2023 and 2024 (for details, see PUC docket numbers 23-413, 24-320, and 24-321), assigning 20-30 of its 90 registered lobbyists to focus on rate setting procedures each year. CenterPoint Energy MN (32 registered lobbyists) and NextEra Energy Resources (nine registered lobbyists) — two other top-spending lobbying organizations in 2023 — also assigned the bulk of their lobbying workforce to influence rate setting proceedings in both 2023 and 2024.
Recent Xcel filings with the PUC show the company's accountants have been keeping an eye on the development of new electronic infrastructure across the state. This includes an expected need to meet a 500-megawatt increase in capacity — enough to power 438,000 average U.S. homes — to supply new data centers including those planned near the company's Sherco coal plant, currently slated to be shut down and replaced.
The second largest lobbyist spend was by Education Minnesota, a union group representing educators in the state with 29 registered lobbyists. The entirety of the organization's $1.1 million lobbying efforts were focused on a handful of bills passing through the Minnesota Legislature concerning teacher pensions, state tax allocations and education funding.
One of the organization's standout filings concerned HF 3567, an assistive reproductive rights bill clarifying parentage and the role of gamete donors in surrogate pregnancies. When MinnPost reached out to clarify Education Minnesota's interest in the bill, a spokesperson said this was an error. The lobbying group intended to file that activity under SF 3567, a education omnibus bill. The accuracy of lobbyist filings rests entirely on the filer, as the CFB does not regularly audit lobbyist reports. The group has since confirmed that they have filed an amendment to that activity to correct the error, but this sort of correction is not a regular outcome.
Another top spender throughout 2023 was FairVote MN (12 registered lobbyists), a political advocacy group pushing for ranked-choice voting in the state. The organization's filings concerned lobbying activity in Minnetonka and Bloomington, two cities that adopted the new voting practice in 2020 and 2021 respectively. Initiatives to repeal ranked-choice voting were voted down the two Twin Cities suburbs in 2023 and 2024. FairVote did not indicate individual legislative or municipal actions in their lobbying reports to the state, though the firm did push for statewide laws switching elections to ranked-choice voting and filed the majority of their lobbying disbursements directed toward the state Legislature.
DoorDash (six registered lobbyists), the gig work food delivery app, was the 9th largest Minnesota lobbying group in 2023. The company was a target of proposed delivery taxes in 2023, levied to fund in-state transportation projects. Food delivery apps including DoorDash and other platforms like UberEats were exempt from separate legislation establishing minimum wages for delivery workers.
