Editorial: Police, services are on chopping block

The library is locked in Hibbing on weekends now, and a lot of planned street maintenance won't get done this year in New Ulm.

Reductions in city services have become so commonplace in Minnesota that they barely attract local mention, let alone notice at the State Capitol. State aid cuts and freezes since 2003 and declining property values since 2008 have wrung things deemed easily expendable out of the budgets of cities all across the map.

But after the 2010 Legislature's latest $66 million cut and its affirmation of Gov. Tim Pawlenty's $150 million unallotment of state aid to cities, decisions are being made in Minnesota's city halls that ought to get state lawmakers' attention. The services that city leaders typically protect when budgets get tight -- police and fire -- are on the chopping block now.

The toll was detailed in memos from city officials collected by the Coalition of Greater Minnesota Cities in recent weeks:

Hibbing has three fewer police officers and two fewer firefighters than a year ago. Marshall is down one police patrol officer and five positions in the fire department. Bemidji cut two police officers. Crookston is considering cutting its daytime police patrol staffing from two officers to one. Winona's city workforce is down 8.7 full-time equivalents, including a police officer. Brainerd is eliminating its full-time fire department and going to on-call service.

St. Cloud, a regional center and college town whose population balloons from 67,000 to 167,000 each weekday, is down four police officers and four firefighters in the past year. "We've already cut everything else," said Mayor David Kleis.

Each of those public-safety staffing reductions ought to be heard at the Capitol as a plea for relief and reform. So should another distress signal: Total city property tax levies in Minnesota have risen from $850 million in 2000 to $1.8 billion this year -- despite two recessions that restrained local impulses to raise taxes. Some cities likely would have chosen to raise a sales or income tax instead of the property tax, if they could have. But state government years ago reserved those two taxes to itself.

This year, the state's biggest city aid program -- local government aid, known as LGA -- will send cities 27 percent less than it did in 2002. They would be getting even smaller amounts if Pawlenty and GOP gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer had their way. As a member of the state House, Emmer voted in March in support of Pawlenty-proposed cuts in city aid twice as large as were ultimately passed.

Emmer said this week that he objects to LGA's distribution, which is based on measures of need for municipal services and local tax capacity. LGA flows to 727 of Minnesota's 824 cities; the remainder, mostly upscale suburbs, don't qualify under the formula. "Only a handful receive the lion's share," Emmer complained. "That violates the original intent, and must be changed."

It's a position that raises more questions than it answers. Does Emmer mean that regional centers like St. Cloud and the big cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul should receive less state help, and suffer more public safety cuts or higher taxes, so that affluent suburbs can receive a state check, too? Isn't it in the state's interest to keep property taxes down and public safety high in places that are otherwise candidates for private-sector investment? Does the state have a particular interest in shoring up the livability of its older communities, to add to the utility of existing infrastructure?