The takeover of the school taxes was quickly eaten up by school tax increases - and the appetite for more school spending is insatiable. Just last week the St Paul teachers pension folks were at the capital asking for even more state subsidy for their pension, while refusing to make structural changes (increased contributions and limitations on benefit increases) to make the fund stable on its own.

The Dems, however, are counting on people to not really pay attention at the local level - from 2002 to the present, some cities have had nothing but cuts, and some cities have had a combination of cuts and aid increases. The cities that are screaming the loudest are generally the ones who are now getting MORE than they got in 2001, while other cities, that have had only cuts, and no longer get any aid from the state, have been quietly letting the big spending, high aid cities get away with their rants. Many of the non-aid cities spend less per capita than the highest aid cities get in LGA. Former State Auditor Pat Anderson tried to point that out, and they crucified her, and the voters pretty much just sat back and let it happen.

The DFL wants you to get mad at the local elected officials in the (largely Republican) suburbs - where cities don’t get any aid, while protecting the locals in their strongholds, by feeding them lots and lots of aid, while letting them plead poverty when they still raise property taxes so they can ask for more aid. Don’t let them get away with it. Check into your city’s actual situation, and find out if you are placing the blame in the right place.

In the Ventura administration, the state handed out money to cities and counties and instead of going DOWN (like everyone involved claimed it would) TAXES KEPT GOING UP!!!!!

Throwing money at the cities and counties is not the answer…..holding the line on city and county spending is the only thing that is going to ensure property tax relief. The state can not “control” cities and counties that are drunk on spending. Only when the citizens stand up to the out of control spending will property taxes start going down.

LL

The state has followed a philosophy that a person’s property taxes should be proportional only to the price of your home - so if you paid $70,000 for a post WW2 story-and-a-half in “Greater Minnesota” your property taxes should be one-third of the property taxes of a suburban resident that paid $210,000 for the same home - even if your outstate city has far more services, and spends far more per-capita than the suburban city. The Dems budget includes big increases in LGA - but only for the cities that already spend a lot of money. So the people who live in cities that have been paying their own way, and living within their means will see little or no “property tax relief” and the people who live in cities that spend like drunken sailors will be rewarded.

There are some property tax credits based on income in the Dems bill, but these would not help suburban businesses at all, and would still give suburban residents far less tax relief than their urban or outstate city counterparts. Given that suburban taxpayers already get a very poor return on their state tax dollars (an average of 50 cents on the dollar or so) and the urban and outstate residents get huge net gains on their state tax dollars, the end result will be to further punish the suburbs, in order to feed the never-ending appetite of the rest of the state.

Just imagine what things would be like if Gov. Pawlenty wasn’t standing in their way with his veto pen.

The “public opinion poll” is one of those modern facts of life that I can do without. Largely that is due to what I learned in college about the methodology of polling. The pollster that tells you that they are not looking for a predetermined……

Even then, they didn’t get the support that Q3 got, which was how many people supported Gov. Pawlenty’s plan.

Follow this link for more on this push polling.