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Editorial: Make best use of shrinking resources

The 1995 Brandl-Weber recommendations deserve another look.

September 23, 2009 at 3:59PM

A gubernatorially commissioned blueprint for sustaining public-sector missions as government revenues shrink was politely received and promptly ignored in 1995, as the swelling dot.com economic bubble of the 1990s made its tight-money forecast seem unduly pessimistic.

Now the 14-year-old report is being dusted off and found to be remarkably prescient. Entitled "An Agenda for Reform," the 30-page outline for getting more bang for scarce tax bucks was prepared at the request of then-GOP Gov. Arne Carlson. Its chief authors were the late Humphrey Institute dean and former DFL legislator John Brandl and former GOP U.S. Rep. Vin Weber, now a Washington-based lobbyist and business consultant. Susan Heegaard, now of the Bush Foundation, guided their work for the now-defunct Minnesota Planning Agency.

Known in Capitol shorthand by its chief authors' names, the Brandl-Weber report (available at tiny.cc/2UoZX) is getting a new lease on life. It's been cited this month at a pair of state policy conferences, and it's being mentioned again by candidates for office as a source of ideas for coping with lean times. The 2009 Legislature confronted a budget gap of more than $4 billion; one prediction puts the gap between revenues and program costs that awaits the 2011 Legislature at more than $7 billion, or about 20 percent of the state's biennial budget.

The ideas in the Brandl-Weber report deserve a fresh look. In a nutshell, they urge redesigning the way government work is accomplished. Brandl-Weber favors targeting government assistance at individuals via means-testing, not at institutions or bureaucracies. It suggests enabling families and communities to provide some services, rather than hiring government employees to do so. And it recommends breaking up government monopolies where possible to unleash competition's power to make services better, cheaper and more innovative.

Some of the report's numerous policy recommendations likely would meet as much resistance today as they did 14 years ago. For example, John Brandl was a big advocate of financing public education by giving families vouchers that could be used at any school, public or private. That idea still runs into stiff resistance from educators who argue that it would undermine, not improve, public schools.

But the Brandl-Weber idea that more state higher education money should flow to needy students rather than directly to state colleges and universities has been incrementally, and perhaps unintentionally, implemented in this decade. Tight money will make a further shift in that direction both likely and desirable, to assure that college stays accessible to Minnesotans of modest means.

Similarly, state aid to local governments has been squeezed hard in this decade, and likely will be again in 2011 and beyond. Brandl-Weber calls for a redefinition of the relationship between state and local governments to make property tax relief for needy homeowners, not subsidies to city and county budgets, the top priority.

Those ideas remain relevant. They also illustrate the value of policy planning within state government. That function was dispersed, and diminished, when the State Planning Agency was disbanded during the 2003 state budget crisis. The hindsight afforded by another crisis shows how pound-foolish balancing the state budget with penny-wise cuts alone can be.

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