On 5/12/05 1:26 AM, "wmmarks" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> He's also presided over the unpleasant task of belt tightening >> required to fix our financial mess, bequeathed to us by the Sharon >> Sayles Belton / Jackie Cherryhomes crowd -- which interestingly >> enough, happens to include Peter McLaughlin. > > Not exactly accurate. SSB came in behind 30 years of red lining of the > inner city by banks, insurance companies, and city services. She had a > mess to clean up left by her predecessors. The NRP was one successful > effort that SSB presided over after Fraser introduced it. Higher numbers > of police officers were also items she spent money on. She supported > Success by Six, she supported Tubman Shelter and other efforts to help > children and women survive in the 21st. century. She had more than a > little to do with bringing down Ferris Alexander, the porn king, and > putting the MN Workforce Office on the corner of Lake and Chicago in > place of Alexander's scuzzy theater. She pushed the city council into > taking some leadership, something they had been rather more lax about > than could continue to be tolerated. She gathered partners in the > legislature and the county and among some of the high rollers to help > her push her agenda. > > All that change cost money, but the city is reaping the rewards in the > ability to charge higher taxes. She brought land out of moth balls for > redevelopment. All these neighborhoods on the South side which had > suffered mightily through those years are in full flood recovery--even > Phillips, the biggest and arguably the worst off of all the neighborhoods. > >> They're the Old Guard who were spendthrift with our tax dollars, >> especially when it came to developers, labor unions, cronies and >> pension funds. They left us a huge mess. > > Did they leave a mess or did they begin the long process of cleaning up > the mess the city had gotten into? I think SSB, et.al. practiced a > brinkmanship that I could not have done were I in their positions, but I > think Mpls. and the entire state benefited from it. Thirty years of > neglect, benign and otherwise, had left the core of the city a mess. I > know that the area of the city where I live certainly benefited from > SSB. If you were to compare the amount of tax dollars being collected > here against what had been being collected before SSB, you might be > pleasantly surprised. Those added taxes are keeping your taxes lower, so > part of what RT is claiming kudos for was put in place by his > predecessor, one SSB.
On the contrary, Chris Johnson's version of city budget history matches pretty closely with version that was well-documented two years ago in the March 2003 City Pages article, "Hard Times at City Hall" http://citypages.com/databank/24/1161/article11092.asp A little excerpt for those who need a refresher: "In 1991, in the midst of the last true nationwide recession, Mayor Don Fraser warned of "belt-tightening" ahead in his annual budget address. Fraser oversaw a city that was then around half a billion dollars in debt for bonding projects. At the same time, Minneapolis's cash expenditures were consistently exceeding its revenues, by as much as $84 million in 1991. By the time Fraser left office in 1993, the debt had grown to $726 million. But those numbers would soon seem modest. After Fraser, the debt spun out of control. City leaders began balancing the books through a combination of bonded debt and debt-shifting maneuvers that were the equivalent of paying off a MasterCard with a Visa. Led by then-mayor Sharon Sayles Belton and a city council obsessed with big development projects, the city plunged ahead. In 1995, Minneapolis spent $132 million more than it made. It didn't stop there. By the time Sayles Belton left office, in 2001, the city's debt was approximately $1.5 billion, and Minneapolis paid $137 million in debt service that year. >From 1990 to 2001, there wasn't a single year in which the city's expenditures didn't exceed its revenues. (The city's 2002 financial statement is not yet available.) The year the budget came closest to being balanced, at the height of boomtime in 1997, the city spent $427.7 million and took in $427.4 million. All told, in those 12 years the city spent $644.7 million more--not including debt--than it took in. And the amount of its total indebtedness--between $1.1 billion and $1.5 billion, depending on how you count--more than doubled." It was this credit-card mentality during the SSB administration, along with the well-documented shots that Minneapolis has taken from the Legislature the past few years that has led to much of the belt-tightening and cries of broken promises that Mayor Rybak now faces from folks with selective memories. This same mentality is exhibited by Peter McLaughlin when he goes on his spiel about how Mayor Rybak "turned down the chance to save $25 million in pension debt." Uh, no. What Mayor Rybak turned down was a chance to return to the days of erasing short-term pain by deferring obligations, just like the SSB administration did when it deferred paying for everything from upgrading the police fleet and computer systems to bonding for legal settlements!?! As the City Pages article details, this is how the SSB administration was able to pretend to keep property taxes in check - it's not so different from putting your daily mocha on the credit card so you can keep that extra $5 in your wallet only to discover at the end of the month that you can't pay off the balance - do you really want to be paying 10-15% interest on last month's coffee fix? Instead, the Rybak administration is practicing sound fiscal management by paying off debt now to allow funds previously budgeted for debt service to be used instead for general operations, like the $1 million that was added to public safety earlier this year after $10 million in debt was retired from last year's city-wide department savings. In other words, it's like how tightening your belt and paying off your Visa lets you spend that $50 a month you were racking up in interest charges on fixing that broken window or getting that car tune-up or whatever other stuff you'd been putting off because you were broke...I know that's the kind of mindset I want in a mayor. Mark Snyder Windom Park REMINDERS: 1. Be civil! Please read the NEW RULES at http://www.e-democracy.org/rules. If you think a member is in violation, contact the list manager at [EMAIL PROTECTED] before continuing it on the list. 2. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. For state and national discussions see: http://e-democracy.org/discuss.html For external forums, see: http://e-democracy.org/mninteract ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[email protected] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
