This kind of backward thinking really alarms me. I think that our previous Commisioner of Transportation made it very clear, that we could not plan new roads and bridges if we aren't willing to maintain the ones that we already have.
If we can't afford to plow our our highways now, what will happen once we've built more of them?
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Molnau would cut highway services to fund new roads http://www.startribune.com/stories/587/3733651.html Laurie Blake, Star Tribune
Published March 5, 2003
"To free money to build new roads, Lt. Gov. Carol Molnau is proposing cuts that could leave highways with snowier surfaces, faded markings and fewer rest areas."
I sent an email to the Transportation Finance Committee members. Here are the emails (for easy cut and paste for your own emails) if others want to send emails to those that have the most power on this decision. I would also encourage people to call Governor Pawlenty's office about this one. 612-296-3391.
[EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
This committee meets regularly on Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 8:15.
Terrell Brown wrote a thoughtful piece on LGA on the Minneapolis Issues forum (which is getting to be more and more noise with less signal). I'm reposting it here because I think it raises issues worth discussing here.
I've been thinking about the LGA thing. I can understand that if the Governor refuses to increase tax revenue he's got to reduce spending and some of that reduction is going to come from local government aids. His "it's never more than 10%" or "anyone should be able to cut 10%" is downright misleading. Take for instance the Minneapolis Convention Center. It's included in the City of Minneapolis budget. There's nothing we can do about it. The Convention Center was built at a cost of something on the order of a billion dollars; it was paid for by the City because among other reasons the state didn't want to include it in ITS bonding limit. So what does the state do? It creates a bunch of taxes that only apply to Minneapolis or parts of Minneapolis that provide the taxes to pay off the bonds to build the thing. Our half-cent city sales tax and the maze of downtown lodging, eating, drinking and entertainment taxes go to pay for the Convention Center. And it's all included in the city budget. The Convention Center budget for 2003 is nearly 65 million
dollars. Based on that the Governor wants to cut $6 million from the city. Makes sense? I don't think so.
Then we have some things called "enterprise funds". The enterprise funds are largely where the city is in the business of providing services to people who don't live here. Take parking. The parking fund includes about 60 million in revenue from, guess what, people paying to park. The Gov wants to take away another 6 million because we provide parking to the folks driving in from Chanhassen, etc. instead of maybe taking a bus (where the revenue is in someone else's budget so we aren't getting directly cut on that one). Oh, we have some other enterprise funds. One of them is water. We sell water to Bloomington, Columbia Heights, Hilltop, Golden Valley, Crystal and Edina. The Governor wants to cut our funding because we're helping those cities out.
Maybe its time to start collecting some money from some of the free loaders. How about a fee for non-Minneapolis residents to park in Minneapolis. Certainly if they got to a Minneapolis parking space, they used our streets, had our police protection, etc. An annual fee of $100 per car for 100,000 cars raises a cool $10 million. I suspect we have more than 100,000 visiting automobiles so we could probably raise a bit more.
Then Minneapolis has a couple of parks that are used by non-residents. It costs me, what 15 bucks for an annual parking sticker (we'll ignore that I probably got to the park by foot). Let's charge non-residents a bit more.
One time we had a Central Library. We ripped it down, or at least are working on doing that. Now the brain trust in the Mayor's office seems to think we can't afford a new one. They wait until we've ripped the old one down to come to that conclusion. They must have the same strange stuff in their water that they're drinking over at the Capitol.
Terrell Brown Loring Park terrell at terrellbrown dot org
Eva Young Near North Minneapolis [EMAIL PROTECTED] Blog is up: http://lloydletta.blogspot.com
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