Our state turns its lonely eyes to you.

Especially when hearing from the current occupant of your old office, Rebecca Otto – a skirt so empty she could sit in for Betty McCollum without anyone knowing the difference.

Otto is bagging on her boss, Governor Pawlenty (and apparently trying to make it appear as if she’s done something in her four years in office), claiming that his unallotment of Local Government Aid has caused property taxes to “soar”, according to Jeff Rosenberg:

State Auditor Rebecca Otto has released the 2008 Minnesota City Finances Report, which has some pretty damning evidence of Tim Pawlenty’s financial mismanagement and the impact it has had on our local governments.

Otto’s report shows that over the last 10 years, as state government and federal government have cut aid to cities, a proportional increase in property taxes has followed. “Governor Pawlenty’s no-new-tax mantra, which is a actually a no-new-state-tax mantra, has really impacted Minnesota families,” said Auditor Otto.

Which is, of course, palpable balderdash.  Cities have been accelerating their spending over the past generation, confident that they’d be able to launder their spending through the state’s LGA program, and committing atrocities against accountability like financing Police and Fire through state aid (which cities don’t directly control, except via lobbying and the endless whining we’ve been subjected to) while paying for fluff like Human Rights departments and convention and visitor bureaus with property tax money, the stuff they actually control.

Some say that cities need to cut their budgets. The report points out that when adjusted for inflation, city expenditures have decreased by 7 percent between 1999 and 2008.

What else has decreased, by vastly more than seven percent, since 1999 (or rather in the past three years)?  Something on which cities base much of their funding?  It’s an integral part of the term “property tax”?  I don’t wanna keep seeing the same hands, here.

Although this report highlights cities instead of school districts, it seems very timely to me, considering Pawlenty’s efforts to take money from our local governments to pay the state’s bills. Throughout Pawlenty’s entire tenure, he has played a shell game by making the state’s finances look better at the expense of our local governments, then blaming our cities and school districts for raising taxes, a game that continues to this very day.

Which makes perfect sense, if history for you began in 2002 (and Jeff’s a young fella, like all those MNPublius hYpStRz, so for him it might well have).

But the shell game began almost forty years ago, when the State of Minnesota essentially created the LGA program to allow local governments to launder their expenditures through the state, to conceal their spending by making the more-productive, more frugal, more pragmatic parts of the state pay for the money pits.  Back then, it involved a wealthy Twin Cities paying for an ageing, scrimping outstate; today, it means thriving third-tier suburbs and mid-sized cities subsidizing Minneapolis and Saint Paul.

And making those governments fend for themselves, and holding them accountable for a generation or two of profligacy, is going to be a very good thing, eventually…

…once people see past the media/DFL/regional leftysphere spin on the subject.

This blog doesn’t “endorse” politicians – doy, who cares what a bunch of bloggers think? – but getting Rebecca Otto out of office is an absolute essential.