Saturday, September 26, 2009

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.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Future of the other "Twin Cities"

Mankato City Manager Pat Hentges spoke to the Downtown Kiwanis Club today and offered a number of interesting views on the "state of the city."

Hottest topic came last, through a question of longtime Kiwanis Club member Claire Faust, former Mankato city councilman and longtime MSU vice president.

What about the merger? asked Faust.

Hentges had made reference to cities combining services in his earlier remarks, talking about the budget crunch cities face, reduced government aid, and an eroding state government picture. And now is not the time for the state to be raising taxes.

Hentges remained diplomatic and noted "merger" decisions were up the the political leadership of both cities, but that, in his view, the cities of Mankato and North Mankato could save 10 percent and not reduce services, but at the same time he reiterated: "It's not going to save a lot of money."

To some, 10 percent would be a good start.

Makes one wonder if the political leadership of each town could discuss the "10 percent solution." Hentges thought out loud that there might be a way to keep each town's identity, but that should be left to people smarter than he.

Among the other items of interest in "state of the city:"

In 2003, local government aid made up 50 percent of city's budget. After Gov. Tim Pawlenty's unallotment this year and cuts of previous year, the amount will be roughly 25 percent.

Cuts of $3 million in city budget will cause city to solicit nonprofits and neighborhood groups to do the plantings around town and maintain them.

They'll cut planting and mowing 15 percent to 20 percent.

The city will be slower to respond to non-emergency public safety calls.

Snowplowing of neighborhood streets might be done later in the day instead of it being cleared curb to curb when you wake up.

The city will call more snow emergencies to get cars moved.

City will attempt to keep property tax levy low, but Hentges notes that on a statewide basis this will be the first year property taxes will bring in more than state income taxes.

Tough budget times will require cities to cooperate more. "We have to look at more mergers" but that mergers between cities and cities make more sense than cities and counties, because counties provide a whole array of services that are very different from cities.

He says he'd love to merge city and county law enforcement but they are so different in how they provide services, it wouldn't work very well.

It's been a big year for parks. City opened new Riverfront Park last week, will be completing improvements to Sibley Park and will be building new youth baseball complex on site of new elementary school south on Monks avenue.

My take: Clearly, a lot is happening in the other "Twin Cities." But budget pressure will reduce a Mayberry-like life to one that is more like......"Gopher Prairie," with apologies to Sinclair Lewis.

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

SPJ story: believers in tough times

Some 600 believers descended on Indianapolis in late August.

I was among them.

Each of us had a connection to a constitutional right every American shares, but very few of us exercise on a daily basis. For the first time in my 25-year career in journalism, I attended the national convention of the Society of Professional Journalists.

The right, of course, is contained in the First Amendment. The right to free speech and the press, and — if it were modified for current times — the right to blog, to provide outrageous content, words, pictures, video, true or not, to a worldwide audience via the World Wide Web.

Many of us take our right for granted, so it’s not discussed a great deal. There were workshops on new media, how to use Facebook, Twitter, and free Internet sites that allow us to “live stream.”

A white haired professor from the University of Florida showed us all the tools we need to be “Mojos” or mobile journalists. It involves a backpack, various USB cables, a laptop computer, a video camera the size of a cell phone and several electrical power supplies that can pull energy from numerous devices, and possibly from a live chicken.

There were snake-like devices to hold your flip cam steady to get the disaster shot to send via wireless to your office, where it can be instantly broadcast around the world.

All we need is an Iphone and livestream.com to bring you the world. Anybody can do it, and if you’ve got $500, you can set up shop as a self publishing Internet “content provider.”

No need for $10 million Goss presses anymore. No hard-drinking, late night working pressmen with ink under their fingernails, scaling monsters of manufacturing to make sure that magenta comes out just right on a maroon gophers uniform.

Still, there were seminars put on by old-fashioned journalists. The photographer for the New York Daily News told of the trauma that comes with continuing to click the horrific images of 9-11. It was his job, not his choice.

We heard from the small-town editor of the Lafayette, La., newspaper sending her entire staff of nine to cover Hurricane Katrina and then Hurricane Rita. Throw in a couple of fatal car accidents with local kids and the “usual” August drowning, and there’s enough trauma there for a lifetime.

Dozens of student journalists attended the convention, all with great enthusiasm for the profession, and with greater knowledge of the new tools than the veterans. Many will not be hired any time soon in an industry that has cut back, but they were still there to hear about the future of journalism. Many of them may shape where we’re going.

And, of course, there were seminars on just where our “business” is going. It’s been no secret the recession has taken its toll on journalism and newspapers, mostly because owners couldn’t see the risk of piling on debt for an industry that was about to have its business model rug pulled out from under it.

The journalists have paid the price. The editor and publisher of the Detroit Free Press talked about a 30 percent reduction in his newsroom in the last few years. This kind of reduction in people whose job it is to monitor corruption in a democracy should scare every American.

Of the three people I met for the first time at a cocktail party, two had been laid off.

Still, somehow these members of the “Society” have endured to tell the stories we all need to hear in the most sensitive way possible, all the while, sometimes, sacrificing their own sanity. I’m glad they’re still with us. I’m glad they’re strong. I’m honored to be in their company.

Because they’re believers. They believe in the First Amendment. They believe in the power a story carries to create empathy and kindness and motivate action on the part of our world community.

I can’t imagine where we’d be without them.