The first footnote on the first page says "The OSA grouped three current city services: general government, public safety, and streets and highways together to form essential current services. All other current services are called non-essential current services for the purposes of this study." I'm willing to give up some "streets and highways" for parks and libraries. Last I checked we have a tremendous number of non-local people using our streets and highways, parks and libraries and a lot fewer people going to other municipalities to use their streets and highways, parks and libraries.
Report: http://www.osa.state.mn.us/reports/gid/2003/lga_study/lga_030210_report.pdf According to the report Minneapolis spends on a per capita basis: General Government: $147.04 Public Safety: $395.73 Streets and Highways $124.72 Total essential services: $667.49 Non-essential: $342.72 Total Spending: $1,010.21 Received 2002 LGA of $291.72 and levied property taxes of $318.77. It's interesting (and maybe just interesting) that on a per capita basis, St. Paul is within 10% of Minneapolis in all of the spending categories on a per capita basis except streets and highways where they spend only 60% of what we do on a per capita basis. For some reason their per capita tax is half of Minneapolis ($319 vs $160). The report (p. 17) says this about Mpls and St. Paul; "As very large cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul face much greater levels of need and complexity in delivering public services. Need is high due to several factors, including an older infrastructure, higher crime rates, heavy use of streets and highways (by industry, by residents, and by commuters), more rental property, and large numbers of low income residents, some attracted to the central cities by the availability of public services." Then says: "The central cities also have the highest per capita spending on non-essential services at $340 per capita. This is almost double of the state average." It underlines the sentence about "almost double" I ask: How much of that is for services (i.e. parks and libraries) for people who don't live here? This report reads more like research done to prove a point than research designed to get to the answer of a question. There is certainly a philosophical reason why many would support each unit of government levying the taxes to pay its own way, it makes it clear to the voters how much that level of government costs. If you do that, it seems reasonable that a given municipality might want to decide to provide services only to those who pay the taxes and charge user fees to all others. Maybe what this report does is provide another reason for why we should have regional government. Terrell Brown Minneapolis (Loring Park) terrell at terrellbrown dot org __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Shopping - Send Flowers for Valentine's Day http://shopping.yahoo.com TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Send all posts in plain-text format. 2. Cut as much of the post you're responding to as possible. ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
