Editorial: Looking at all they can do to save

The League of Minnesota Cities list goes on for pages and reads like a municipal version of frugal homemaker tips.

To balance ailing budgets in this era of declining property values, rising employee health care costs and state aid cuts, cities across Minnesota are increasingly taking a welcome, tough-minded approach to reducing expenses and maximizing efficiency. The league's vast spreadsheet keeps a running tally of the difficult yet often creative choices made:

"Working with county and school district to purchase diesel fuel" in volume, reads one entry from northwestern Minnesota. A community just west of the Twin Cities is using existing city staff to deliver Meals on Wheels instead of hiring a coordinator. Two small southern Minnesota towns will share one city administrator. A nearby city is launching an Adopt-A-Park program instead of paying employees to clean up beaches and picnic shelters.

Such resourcefulness is a distinctly Minnesota trait, one that sustained our pioneer forebears and enabled generations of civic leaders to turn a cold, out-of-the-way state into one perennially lauded in national quality-of-life, education and health care rankings. Cities are admirably carrying on that tradition as they grapple with some of the most challenging economic times they've ever faced.

From Brainerd to Byron to Burnsville, Minnesota's elected local officials and their staffs are typically greeting tough times with pragmatic ingenuity aimed at maintaining critical services while minimizing pressure on taxpayers. Especially when spendthrift bureaucrats are so often scapegoated, these hardworking officials deserve praise for helping their communities weather the current crisis and prepare for uncertainties ahead.

"What stands out is how many different things cities are trying," said Rachel Walker, policy analysis manager for the League. "In the past, they may have been able just to cut back on parks or mowing or the ice rinks. Now they're doing all those things, and looking at [staff] wages ... layoffs, cutting snow plowing and asking for unpaid furloughs. They're really looking across the board at everything they can do."

The reality is that these officials have little choice in the matter. Cutbacks in state aid (which can comprise a third or more of some cities' budgets) are significant. At the same time, the housing crash dealt a blow to cities' other key sources of income -- property taxes, building permits -- while costs for fuel, health care and pensions are rising. Hitting taxpayers with massive property tax hikes isn't fair or realistic. Their household budgets are also squeezed.

Where painful cuts are necessary, Minnesota city officials are working to manage them intelligently. Burnsville in particular deserves praise for how it recently found $3.5 million in cuts -- which allowed the southern suburb to provide for a zero percent levy increase in 2010 while absorbing the loss of state aid. City manager Craig Ebeling and his staff prepared a list of cost-saving measures for the City Council and provided a sense of how the various choices would affect a previously decided vision and set of goals for the city. That helped council members focus their discussion, set priorities and make the cuts least damaging to the city's future -- a model process for other cities.