Ramstad: At last, the status quo may be changing in Minnesota government

Since asking in my first column in 2023 whether Minnesota can stay rich without growth, I’ve been looking for signs that state and local governments will adapt to low growth, as businesses have been.

This week, at last, I saw one.

It happened Monday at a conference hosted by the Minnesota Center for Fiscal Excellence, the taxpayer watchdog group respected by both policymakers and businesses, during a panel of state leaders assessing moves by President Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress to transfer work from the federal to state level.

The state and county leaders on the panel described being caught between Trump’s “big shift” and the anger of Minnesota taxpayers experiencing double-digit percentage increases in property taxes.

Former Minnesota Revenue Commissioner John James asked the audience whether counties might turn some costly human-services work over to the state, an efficiency idea that has been batted around for decades but has been mostly dormant since the early 2010s.

“Short answer, yes,” said Matt Hilgart, government relations chief for the Association of Minnesota Counties.

Specifically, he said leaders in the state’s 87 counties have warmed to letting the state take on the work of vetting the eligibility of Minnesotans for public assistance, health care and cash and food support.

Now, I don’t want to overstate things. We’re not talking about a change on the order of the state’s takeover of school funding in the 1970s. We’re not talking about suburbs merging, police in the Twin Cities metro becoming centralized or the tax system being overhauled.

I do think all of those things and more should be on the table to try to slow the growth of Minnesota governments and make them less of a drag on the state’s overall economy.

For now, I’m happy to see this discussion coming out of county leaders. It shows the status quo in Minnesota government is cracking and that leaders recognize they’re not performing the way Minnesotans expect. It’s great to see some imagination being applied to the future.

These days, the public discussion about Minnesota government revolves around fraud in state agencies and Trump. Judging from the early comments of the 2026 gubernatorial candidates, those topics will likely dominate next year’s campaigns. They’re important, but backward-looking.

I want to hear more about future-oriented ideas, like making the delivery of human services better, because government structures and processes designed for a state population growing at least 1% a year don’t work in a state growing at less than half that rate.

Minnesota is one of less than 10 states that administer human services through counties. Recently, the costs of nondiscretionary responsibilities like these have overwhelmed counties’ finances, leading more of them to cut back on discretionary services like running libraries and museums.

County leaders can skim the icing, but they eventually need to look at the cake itself. And that’s what Hilgart signaled is happening.

“What’s changed is the portion of time that county staff, and thus levies and budgets, are supporting for nonfrill administrative work,” he said. “Signing up and communicating, not getting to the service themselves. Just accessing, checking credentials, eligibility. It’s compounding effects on levies in ways that were not expected nor can be sustained.”

The idea to reform human services last got a big push in the early 2010s, when the Bush Foundation and Accenture, working with 12 Minnesota counties of various sizes, researched delivering them via regional districts rather than counties.

The analysis showed there would be enormous cost savings, said Peter Hutchinson, a former state budget director who led Bush Foundation at the time. Ultimately the counties, he said, “could not imagine how they would give up that much individual authority and there were all these tensions.”

Hilgart said county officials think they should maintain control of the delivery of human services. “It makes sense to have local people who are driven to serve people with complex needs and who, frankly, the private sector or even the nonprofit sector are not interested in going to serve,” he said.

But there is one big virtue to changing the eligibility process: moving beyond computer systems dating to the 1980s that, as my colleagues Jessie Van Berkel and Jill Burcum have written, drive workers and the Minnesotans they serve to tears.

Minnesota’s main system for case management is rooted in DOS, the original operating system of personal computers. It doesn’t use a mouse and is still rendered in the green characters of computers before there were color monitors.

Angela Youngerberg, who worked for 16 years as a human services caseworker in Blue Earth County, this week told me about a moment five years ago when she hired someone who didn’t realize the age of the systems.

“On her second day of employment, she came in and said to me, ‘You didn’t tell me about the green screens,’” Youngerberg said. “She said, ‘I’ve never seen a green screen. I’ve never, never worked in this.’”