Small towns hammered by cuts

Sunday's Free Press editorial takes aim at unfair taxation imposed on outstate Minnesota and small towns.

A conversation this week with small-town mayors with the Coalition of Greater Minnesota Cities lead me to believe this situation is getting worse, and people won't know it until they wake up one morning and their street is not plowed, and it's been a week since police responded to their call to report vandalism in their neighborhood.

Property taxes will rise to a level in places like Wells and Lake Crystal where they put these towns out of the running for any industrial or commercial development. Exaggeration you say.?I doubt it, but time will tell.

We have a lot of politicians who want to have it both ways. They want to say they support small towns, mostly because they make up a sizable part of Minnesota's voting block and they're likely to vote for the person and not the party. But they also want to adhere to the no-new taxes pledge. Unfortunately, taxes have been rising throughout the history of the pledge and they've been put on small towns residents on fixed incomes. State politicians have blamed local officials for spending, but have done little to reduce state mandates for spending. You can't have it both ways, state legislators.

Unfortunately, small towns don't have access to the information on how their legislators are performing. There are just not enough outlets in small towns, and the leaflets some legislators put out about their voting record our outstanding exaggerations or outright lies.

The Coalition only wants gubernatorial candidates to say how they stand on fair small town taxation. But there are plenty of legislators in rural Minnesota who need to come clean also.