A conference committee between the Minnesota State House and Senate recently announced an agreement to resolve differences in two competing proposals to expand the solar energy requirement for investor-owned utilities. Under the proposal, investor-owned utilities (such as Xcel Energy and Minnesota Power) must generate 1.5 percent of its electricity from solar power by 2020.

Elise Gould and Natalie Sabadish at the Economic Policy Institute recently took a look at health expenditure data and found some interesting patterns – chiefly that health spending in this country is distributed extremely differently among certain groups. As their cool infographic below shows, a big chunk of what we spend as a country on health care goes to a tiny fraction of the population. In fact, half of all health care dollars are spent by only five percent of the population, while the top 20 percent of spenders consume 82 percent of all health-care dollars.

A gas tax increase in Minnesota appears dead for this session. A plan to index Louisiana’s gas tax to inflation failed to win votes this week. And transportation funding plans are moving forward in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania but face political challenges ahead. Here’s the latest roundup of what’s going on around the country as states seek solutions to meeting their transportation needs.

A Circuit Court judge’s decision in Virginia could spell trouble for a tunnel project already under construction in the Norfolk-Portsmouth area and could have broader ramifications for the future use of public-private partnerships (P3s) in the commonwealth. I also have links to a number of other recent items on tolling and P3s and more on a conference this summer that will bring these issues into sharp focus.