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Big cities brace for veto fallout
The Democratic mayors of Minnesota's two largest cities had harsh words for Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty, a day after he vetoed a bill packed with new local government aid. "We're going to keep doing our hard work in Minneapolis," Mayor RT Rybak told KARE 11 Thursday. "But the Governor has once again made it harder for cities around the state to keep property taxes down and keep crime down." Statewide cities and counties were on track to get a $70 million boost in local aid, with $13 million of that headed to Minneapolis. "I?ll tell you it?s harder for mayors and citizens around the state to keep their streets safe and their property taxes down when the Governor keeps cutting the very tools that we use to help make it safer and more affordable for our citizens," Rybak said. The Governor last week signalled his intention to veto the omnibus tax bill, which passed in the final minutes of the 2007 session. "When I tell them in writing that if they put something in a bill I'm going to veto it, and they choose to ignore me, that's not a good development," Pawlenty told reporters last Tuesday. Poison Pills and Partisan Politics In his veto letter Wednesday he repeated his objections to the bill, a piece of policy that would require the administration to build inflation into the spending forecast. It was standard budgeting practice at the Capitol prior to 2002. And DFL senate leaders, who added the provision to the tax bill, say it's a more honest form of accounting. But the Governor argues it would become a mechanism that automatically increases the size of the budget, building in an assumption that all programs will grow every two years. In the governor's words,"That is putting government on auto pilot, building back into the government forcast for spending that everything?s gonna go up automatically every year." The Governor and his supporters labelled the inflation factor language as a "poison pill" he was expected to accept. "The strategy of the Democrats was always to put before the governor bills with poison pills in them," David Strom of the Taxpayers League told KARE 11. "The governor just said 'NO I'm not gonna follow this strategy. If you want to sit down and talk and govern together we'll do that'." Saint Paul Mayor Chris Coleman believes the poison pill defense has more to do with the Governor's national standing than it does with Minnesota's fiscal management. "If accountability becomes a poison pill you have to really wonder what the governor's motivation is on this," Coleman told KARE 11. "To me this is a political message, not a budget message," Coleman remarked. "A message that plays better in Washington DC for the Governor than it does on the local level in the state of Minnesota." Saint Paul Squeeze Coleman's facing a $16 million budget deficit for the second year in a row in Saint Paul, a situation he blames on rising costs and the lingering effects of local government aid cuts from 2003. "I think the Governor?s abandoned cities in the state of Minnesota." "We?re not talking luxury items. We?re talking about basic services people have come to expect in cities," the Mayor said of the city functions dependent in some part on aid from the state. "Public safety, kids programs, libraries, parks. The basic city services." Coleman predicts homeowners and other property owners will most likely pick up the tab for the $9 million lost to Wednesday's veto. "We don't have the resources we need to do make that up, absent sticking it to the property tax payers, which is what the Governor's philosophy apparently is." But David Strom says the big city mayors should point the finger instead at their fellow DFLers, the Democrats at the Capitol who didn't respond to the Governor's veto threats. "The Democrats have to recognize that the Governor was elected and this time around they tried to run the entire state as if there was no governor. And the Governor said no." And yet Mayor Coleman isn't about to blame lawmakers, or accuse them of putting local government aid at risk as part of a political game. "The Democratic leadership was trying to do the responsible thing," Coleman said. "They were trying to do what we do at the city level, which is include the real costs of doing business." Libraries in Limbo For Minneapolis the Governor's final flurry of actions on bills held more bad news. The Minneapolis library system's merger with Hennepin County's libraries was thrown into doubt, when the Governor used a line-item veto to nix $4.5 million in state aid needed to cement the deal. "Well the Governor certainly went out of his way to deliver a one-two punch to the libraries in the city," Rybak said. Strom sees it differently. "The Governor was trying to protect the taxpayers of Hennepin County from bailing out Minneapolis again," Strom argued. "Minneapolis was gonna get bailed out for all of its big mistakes. All they did was make mistake after mistake, build libraries they didn?t have the money to keep up or keep open." The Property Tax Debate Coleman and Rybak have long criticized the Governor, for failing to publicly recognize the impacts of the $150 million cut from local aid statewide in 2003. As Rybak put it,"Property taxes and crime went through the roof throughout the state. So once again he?s made cuts that will mean higher property taxes and few police around the state." The Governor during his reelection campaign maintained that loss of local aid is responsible for only a fraction of the rapidly rising property tax bills most Minnesotans have experienced this decade. And during a press conference the day after the session Pawlenty suggested that theory would be proven once and for all if cities could receive the aid boost in the Omnibus Tax Bill. "This will be a great test case to see if upping local government aid really lowers local property taxes." The major cuts were made during the budget crisis of 2003. When Pawlenty took office that year the state faced a projected deficit of more than $5 billion. He engineered a balanced budget for fiscal 2004-2005 without raising income taxes. Leadership Qualities The veto was used by both sides to make arguments about Governor Pawlenty's leadership abilities. Rybak found them lacking. "At the end of the day you need one leader to stand up and take the lead. He chose not to do that. And it means higher property taxes, it means higher crime." David Strom, on the other hand, offered the vetoes of proof of Pawlenty's leadership qualities. "He really showed tremendous leadership," Strom said. "And I say this as someone who?s criticized him more than once, a tremendous job of leadership and I think the state is gonna be much better off for it." The Governor did no media events connected to the vetoes Wednesday, choosing instead to let his veto letters speak for him. In fact, in constrast to 2005's gas tax veto, Pawlenty's made no public ceremonies out of any of his vetoes in 2007.
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