{"id":11077,"date":"2010-05-26T12:00:38","date_gmt":"2010-05-26T17:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=11077"},"modified":"2010-05-26T10:48:32","modified_gmt":"2010-05-26T15:48:32","slug":"chanting-points-memo-lga-cuts-are-destroying-minnesota-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=11077","title":{"rendered":"Chanting Points Memo: “LGA Cuts Are Destroying Minnesota!” (Part II)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Question:\u00a0 Has your disposable income gone up 44% in the past ten years?<\/p>\n

\u00a0As I noted yesterday, Local Government Aid was originally set up to transfer wealth from the wealthy Twin Cities to smaller towns in then-poor outstate Minnesota.\u00a0 To a great extent, it worked; outstate Minnesota came a long way very quickly, in what was called “The Minnesota Miracle”.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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One of the cities in outstate Minnesota that benefitted from Local Government Aid nearly forty years ago was Brainerd.\u00a0 The capitol of Minnesota’s lake country tourist district, Brainerd was and is a sleepy town of about 18,000 year-round, whose area swells to six digits on a summer fishing weekend.<\/p>\n

But the cuts in Local Government Aid have apparently hobbled plucky Brainerd; as Jeff Rosenberg of MNPublius <\/em>plaintively pleaded <\/a>earlier this week:<\/p>\n

How bad have local government spending cuts become? The city of Brainerd has started turning off the lights:<\/p>\n

Selected streetlights \u2013 in alleys, in mid blocks and duplicates at intersections \u2013 started being shut off by the utility in early May in response to the Brainerd City Council\u2019s direction to reduce the street lighting budget by $91,000. Brainerd Public Utilities Superintendent Tom Phelps told the Personnel and Finance Committee that in addition to shutting off lights he\u2019s been reducing wattage in downtown decorative lights and looking at switching to LED lights.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, if you’re a typical homeowner and provider for a family in these tough times, you might be forgiven for responding “Good!\u00a0 Let them cut back!<\/em>”\u00a0 I mean, Rosenberg even notes that the street and alley lights that are the subject of this tragedy are duplicates, or ones found in the middle of the block, or in some of the alleys in sleepy, relatively crime-less Brainerd.\u00a0 It’s a selective<\/em>\u00a0 cut, not a wholesale blackout.\u00a0 There’s no indication that any of the lighting is essential to safety; they’re redudant and\/or decorative!<\/p>\n

Unless your point of view is that no government “service”, no matter now non-critical, shall ever <\/em>want for even the most trivial nonessential funding, what is <\/em>the fuss about these “cuts?”\u00a0 Indeed, if we go through a year without any problems from the shut-off lights, could it be fairly asked if the lights were needed in the first place?<\/p>\n

But no mind.\u00a0 The “service” is being cut, we’re told by the left and media (pardon the redundancy) because Brainerd’s Local Government Aid has been gutted.\u00a0 Jeff ask\u00a0 – and, since MNPublius <\/em>is as close to being an institutional voice of the DFL as exists in the Twin Cities blogosphere, we can assume this is part of the Party’s portfolio of chanting points – “How bad have local government spending cuts become?”<\/p>\n

Good question.<\/p>\n

I checked League of Minnesota Cities<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0website, which includes tax and LGA data for much of recorded history.\u00a0\u00a0 In it we see that Brainerd’s allotment of Local Government Aid has gamboled around a bit:<\/p>\n