Minnesota Senate Majority Leader Tom Bakk has been saying for weeks that the Senate won’t vote for an annual inflation adjustment to the minimum wage. On Thursday, he proposed letting voters decide.

Bakk, of Cook, is co-sponsoring a bill from fellow DFL Sen. Ann Rest of New Hope that proposes a constitutional amendment that would lock in inflationary adjustments for the minimum wage starting in 2017.

A House-Senate conference committee has agreed in principle on increasing the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour, but its members remain deadlocked over an annual inflator — the House wants one; the Senate doesn’t.

Bakk said 10 of the 11 states that index their minimum wage to inflation did so with voter approval.

Rep. Ryan Winkler, DFL-Golden Valley, who leads the three-member House team on the conference committee, dismissed the proposed amendment as “negotiating noise.”

“I don’t think that there’s a majority in the Senate, or even the Senate majority leader, who actually thinks that we should legislate through the constitution,” Winkler said.

“We’ve had some experience with that in the last couple of years on marriage and on voting, and the voters of Minnesota certainly didn’t like it.”

Both opponents and supporters of raising the minimum wage panned the proposed amendment Thursday.

The Raise the Wage coalition, a group of labor and other organizations that support a $9.50 wage indexed to inflation, declared minimum wage “a legislative issue, not a constitutional one.”

And Jamie Pfuhl, president of the Minnesota Grocers Association, said, “The Legislature has the opportunity to do what they think is best, and a constitutional amendment is not the way to resolve this issue.”

Bakk said adding an inflation adjustment to the constitution would put it beyond the reach of future state leaders to undo.

“You cannot resolve it permanently in statute, because future Legislatures, future leaders are going to spar over it as an end-of-session piece on the table, and if it’s in the constitution it can’t be,” he said.

“Constitutions are about protecting minority views on things, and clearly low-income people working at minimum wage are a minority in this state, and this provides those people some kind of assurance that their wages are going to keep up.”

Bakk said he would be open to putting the question to voters on either the 2014 or 2016 ballot.

Winkler said after the conference committee recessed without an agreement that public negotiating sessions over minimum wage aren’t working and that “we will try to have some more private discussions.”

He said he’s confident the House and Senate can get a deal this session that includes an inflator the Senate can live with. He said there’s no reason for the House to jump on the constitutional amendment idea as a way out of the impasse over automatic increases. “I don’t believe in punting on second down,” Winkler said.

Minnesota’s minimum wage for large employers now is $6.15, among the lowest in the nation. In practice, however, most minimum-wage jobs in Minnesota pay the federal rate of $7.25 per hour. An increase to $9.50 would make Minnesota one of the highest minimum-wage states.

Doug Belden can be reached at 651-228-5136. Follow him at twitter.com/dbeldenpipress.