St. Cloud Times: The Legacy Amendment: Any regrets?

Caroline Yang, New York Times

A scene from the 2008 election, when Minnesota voters agreed to raise the state sales tax to fund environmental, cultural and arts projects.

Especially now that you can see how the money is being spent in hard times?

By FROM AN EDITORIAL IN THE ST. CLOUD TIMES

Last update: November 25, 2009 - 4:58 PM

A lack of accountability to voters, a lack of details and constitutional paralysis on putting public dollars where they may be needed most -- for these and many reasons, we've long taken issue with Minnesota's Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment.

Most Minnesota voters, though, thought otherwise in 2008 and agreed to raise the state sales tax one-eighth of a percent for 25 years so that $11 billion could be raised and spent on environmental, cultural and arts projects.

Now that the first returns on those investments are starting to come in, we can't help wondering how many Minnesotans might be having second thoughts about this amendment.

Look no further than a recent St. Cloud Times news report about Legacy Amendment funds for KVSC-FM -- the campus radio station at St. Cloud State University -- and grants from the Central Minnesota Arts Board.

KVSC stands to get up to $238,000 by the middle of 2011 from the tax. Among the uses: adding staff, improving and expanding its Web presence, expanding signal strength and providing live coverage of events as far away as Canada.

At a time when college students face rising tuitions, universities have endless lists of building projects, and faculty and staff face pay freezes, is this really the best use of $238,000 of public money?

Indeed, would you have voted "yes" if you knew expanding a campus radio station's signal to Alexandria and covering a musical festival in Canada were considered preserving Minnesota's arts and cultural legacies?

Similarly, your sales tax dollars will double -- to almost $500,000 -- the grants the Central Minnesota Arts Board expects to provide to area artists each of the next two years. Certainly, there is merit in providing assistance to help preserve, even expand, the arts. But doubling the amount in these economic times?

And those are just some local examples. A sampling of other recent news reports reveal a $268,000 award for programming to a Park Rapids, Minn., public library, not to mention an untold number of government jobs and internships being created to assess impaired waters, serve as naturalists, create trails and the like.

And remember, there remain 24 more years of funds to be doled out. Plus, you have little say in such matters and virtually no mechanisms for measuring accountability, much less success or failure.

As we have said from the start, yes, Minnesota's outdoors, culture and arts certainly deserve public help. But neither they nor any public interest should be provided with funds regardless of other fiscal needs -- and especially if voters have no realistic way to slow or even stop that funding stream for a quarter of a century.

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