Lori Sturdevant: Unallotment: Could've been worse, but ...

Minnesotans got a better look Tuesday at what the no-deal finish to the 2009 legislative session will mean.

It's a little "ouch" to school districts, and a bigger "ow" to higher education and low-income renters.

For providers of health care to the poor, and for the regional centers and big cities that receive substantial state aid? You'd hear them howling in pain on the street today were it not for the fact that they were braced for even worse than they got.

In the Minnesota vernacular, "coulda been worse" pretty well characterizes the $2.65 billion package of spending cuts, payment delays and revenue accelerations that Gov. Tim Pawlenty rolled out Tuesday as his recommended 2010-11 unallotment.

The package counts as a recommendation through a comment period that will include a legislative hearing (and Pawlenty commissioner fricasseeing) on Thursday. By July 1, a list that will look a lot like Tuesday's is due to become law by executive order.

Fears that the Republican governor would cut deeper did not materialize, largely because he deployed a few unanticipated accounting gimmicks. They serve to mask the real depth of the chronic money problem the state faces. More than $1.9 billion of the unallotment package consists of moving spending and tax collections around, not actually reducing spending.

And not raising state taxes. That, after all, is the point of the exercise for Pawlenty. It was his unwillingness to swallow even a smidgeon of a state tax increase -- and the DFLers' unwillingness to send him a budget without one -- that set up the conditions that appear to open the door to unallotment.

That difference matters much to Pawlenty. He makes much of the distance between the statehouse and city halls and county courthouses. He has taken to advising local officials to "get their heads out of the clouds" and cut spending in the face of "the worst economic crisis since World War II."

Of course, for local governments that rely heavily on state assistance, the economic crisis started in 2003, the last time Pawlenty pushed a big cut in city and county aid. City spending has risen at a slower pace than the state's spending since then. Total city employment ranks are several thousand smaller today than six years ago.

They'll be smaller still after the cuts Pawlenty anticipates take hold. Smaller local government payrolls are coming as surely as are higher property taxes. During a recession, such job losses are doubly lamentable. They add to the joblessness drag on the total economy, and they leave undone some portion of public work that communities often need more of to recover from recession.

Those are the obvious implications of the failure to end the 2009 session with a bipartisan compromise. What has this government watcher worried is more subtle: It's how this year's application of the unallotment statute is tipping state government's balance of power in the executive branch's direction.

Through almost two decades, Minnesota voters have elected legislators and governors of opposing political persuasions and have given them an implicit mandate: Compromise.

This year, Minnesota witnessed a failure to live up to that mandate. When that has happened before, a special session followed. It didn't this year because Pawlenty saw an opportunity to take unallotment out of his box of power tools and use it big-time.

No other governor has done so at the start of a biennium to close a budget gap created by his own veto of a tax bill. Minnesotans can expect that someone will invite the judicial branch to double-check the validity of this particular executive-branch power play.

If Pawlenty's use of unallotment passes legal muster, it will stand in state political memory as a disincentive for governors to compromise with Legislatures controlled by the opposite party. Get them to pass spending bills, then take over from there with line-item vetoes and unallotment -- that could be the new normal when state government is divided and in money trouble.

That's more power than state government's designers likely intended for a governor. And it runs counter to the blended policy result that most voters who like their government divided have in mind.

Lori Sturdevant is a Star Tribune editorial writer and columnist. She is at lsturdevant@startribune.com.