I know it sounds counter-intuitive to say that the bonding proposal with the higher price tag is more fiscally responsible. But it’s not nearly as simple as looking at the size of the proposal.
Over the long run, a large bonding bill this year will save us a lot of money, in addition to putting people back to work.
Because it is spread out over 15 to 20 years, the annual cost of a larger bonding bill would be relatively small. Even a very large increase in the size of the bonding bill costs relatively little on an annual basis. This isn’t just financial sleight-of-hand, though; it is a well-accepted budgeting practice to spread the cost of large infrastructure projects over many years, so they are paid for by the people who use them throughout their life span.
In addition, we’ll be getting more bang for our buck on everything we build this year. Right now, interest rates are down, making bonding cheaper, and contractors’ bids are likely to be significantly lower. We can fund critical infrastructure needs more cheaply today than we could in a couple of years. That’s why spending the money today, instead of in two years, will save us money in the long run.
Given the small difference in annual payments, we should spend more on bonding when it’s the most affordable. It would be extremely unfortunate to allow our budget deficit today to stop us from saving money over the next 20 years.
It all comes down to the next couple weeks folks. If GAMC has any shot of surviving, it has to happen in the next couple weeks. Come on down to the Capital Rotunda. I’ve been to rallies before and let me tell you, it’s much harder for a legislator to ignore a thousand people than one hundred. I know it’s a pain to head over to the capital in the middle of the day, but this really is the best shot at making your voice hear. We need you, thousands of your neighbors need you, and Minnesota needs you.
WHO: You, and hundreds of others who want to protect the poor and vulnerable
WHAT: Rally and community action to save
GAMC WHERE: The Minnesota State Capitol, St. Paul
WHEN: Thursday, February 4, 2010, 11:30 AM to 1:30 PM
Update: I’m down here and it’s packed! Get on down to the Capital if you can.
Update 2:
Everyone is taking a moment to hold up signs of those they know who will be affected by the elimination of GAMC. Quite powerful. It’s tough to see the signs in this dinky iPhone picture so I took a pic of the woman next to me as well.
Update 3:
This is my favorite sign so far. So true.
Update 4:
Yep, it’s packed in here.
Senator Marty showing his support
Minnesota has a $1.2 billion shortfall for this year, and that’s on top of $6 to $8 billion in the coming biennium. So it makes sense that our governor would be talking about new ways to earn revenue.
Except that he’s not talking about using it to ease the deficit; he’s proposing that it go to pay for subsidizing a new Vikings stadium. Pawlenty suggested that we could raise funds from new lottery games to help pay for a new stadium.
My favorite part was when he all but acknowledged that there were better uses for that money:
Although 40 percent of those funds — $ 8 million — is constitutionally dedicated to an environmental trust fund, “the other $12 [million] can be used for other stuff. People will say it should go into schools or roads or whatever, but … that’s another way to do [the stadium].”
Yeah, I’d be one of those people who would say it should go into “schools or roads or whatever.” We are hemorrhaging money right now, so much so that we’re taking it from our schools to keep the state financially solvent. It would seem to me that before we could talk about new revenues going to pay for anything, we need to pay our schools the money we’ve taken from them. I know that people don’t want to lose the Vikes, but can anyone justify taking money from our schools and then using new revenues not to pay them back, but to build a professional football stadium?
Very early this morning, nothing has changed from
Matt’s last update. I’d like to add a few thoughts on the results that are in so far.
First, all I have to say about the results on the Republican side is that sometimes I envy the Republicans. They’re now down to two candidates, with a clear frontrunner in Marty Seifert. Man, is that going to be a lot easier to narrow down than the DFL’s options. Once again, the GOP will have their choice early while the DFLers attack each other going into the primary.
On the DFL side, a few thoughts:
- This looks like a big win for RT Rybak. I don’t know if the percentages will hold, but with 77.04% reporting, he’s on top with 21.8% of the vote. Going into the straw poll, all the discussion was how much MAK would win by, so if Rybak can hold on, it will be a bit of an upset. Perhaps more importantly, MAK has to worry about her performance during the legislative session, while all Rybak has to worry about is campaigning. (And, you know, governing Minneapolis, but given our weak mayor system that’s unlikely to get in the way too much.)
More »« Less
Tom Emmer’s gubernatorial campaign has been gaining momentum in recent days. Emmer, who has been challenging front-runner Marty Seifert from the right, secured the endorsement of former Senator Rod Grams and State Representative Laura Brod. Not everything, however, is going so well for Team Emmer.
Emmer made news early last week by announcing that he would file an amicus brief in the unallotment case with the Minnesota Supreme Court. Sadly, at least for Emmer, the Minnesota Supreme Court doesn’t accept briefs from just anyone and when the Court released the list of parties whose briefs they wanted to read on Thursday, Emmer hadn’t made the cut. I can’t say I blame them - I’ve been refusing to listen to Emmer for years. The court accepted briefs from the City of St. Paul, the City of Minneapolis, The Minnesota House, The League of Women Voters, Common Cause, The League of Minnesota Cities and a couple of law professors and gave no explanation for why they rejected Emmer’s brief.
Still, the slight is especially unfortunate considering that Emmer (who is an attorney by profession) has long been rumored to be interested in running for Attorney General. In fact, rumors that Emmer might switch to the AG race have been intensifying in recent weeks. But you have to ask yourself just how effective an Attorney General he would be considering he couldn’t even write a brief interesting enough to compete with the League of Women Voters.
Updated, see below — smells like the MN GOP fished a lie of a story to Politico, Politico screwed up by publishing it and quickly corrected it… but not before the MN GOP tweeted and posted about it.
The Minnesota GOP has been shopping around the lie that Mark Ritchie was Al Franken’s “guest” at the State of the Union last night. Of course, it’s completely false. That doesn’t stop Luke Hellier, however:
He links to this piece with the Politico which says:
Shameless. Yet another shining example of how the Minnesota GOP tries to create “news.”
Update: David Brauer digs deeper and gets this quote from Politico:
We received an anonymous tip re: Ritchie and due to a communication breakdown, this was incorrectly reported. I thought the error had been removed from all story references on the site. We are issuing a correction in the story the item appears.
So Politico screws up because someone lied to them and didn’t get the record straight from who they named as their source. Mark Ritchie wasn’t even at the SotU. Very interesting how quickly the MN GOP jumped on the story right between the time it got posted and got corrected. This story is bigger than a misquote: it sure seems like the MN GOP was fishing to get this story published with a lie.
Considering the political climate, and the fact that this seat has been held by a Republican for decades, I think Jason Engbrecht did a great job. In the end, though, Mike Parry won last night’s special election with 43 percent of the vote to Engbrecht’s 36.50 percent, with Roy Srp pulling in 20 percent.
There’s really only one point I want to be sure to make: Mike Parry is not Minnesota’s Scott Brown. He has not altered the balance of power one iota, nor pulled off an astonishing upset. DFLers were hopeful of winning the race, but given Democrats’ disappointment with the situation in Washington, problems with turnout were to be expected, and turnout is everything in a special election. Minnesota Republicans are going to make a big deal of this being the start of a Republican “wave,” but it’s hard to see how Republican replacing another constitutes a wave.
Was this a disappointing election for the DFL? sure. Was it a particularly momentous one? I personally don’t think so.
With
three new stops officially approved yesterday, the Central Corridor LRT line between Minneapolis and St. Paul now will bear more resemblance to a bus than a train, making frequent stops and travelling at a snail’s pace. The move will give riders greater access — but it will give them access to such a slow ride that I wonder why they’ll bother.
Sometimes I wonder if the Twin Cities should even bother with rail transit, and I say that as someone who’s usually a major advocate for it. But we’re showing an impressive ability to make every rail project we build into a ridiculous mess.
Let’s review our history:
More »« Less
For what it’s worth,
Mark Dayton supports the idea:
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mark Dayton says he would consider supporting a Twin Cities casino to raise money for Minnesota’s ailing budget, but not for a new Vikings stadium.
I had been thinking about this for a couple of weeks before Dayton’s proposal. It’s never been a really popular idea, and I hate the idea of putting up a casino just to enable our government’s refusal to make tough decisions. But, in the end, it comes down to a simple question: Is our budget situation desperate enough that we need to look at any and all options for bringing in new revenues? I’m starting to think it is, unless one of the Republican candidates for Governor can come up with a detailed proposal for cutting $7 billion from the budget that we’re all willing to live with.
Of course, a casino in itself won’t come close to solving our budget problems, but it would represent new revenues without raising taxes. At this point, I think it’s worth at least having a discussion about any revenue-raising option that could see bipartisan support.
Do you live in Senate District 26?
If so, don’t forget to vote for DFLer Jason Engbrecht in today’s special election! Polls close at 8 pm.
Not sure if you live in Senate District 26? Check the Secretary of State’s handy district map.
I’m at the “Save GAMC Gathering” at St. Edwards Church in Bloomington. If you can, come on down, we’re going until noon. The program is put on by the Cabrini Partnership and is aimed at educating people about the imminent GAMC crisis.
I’m attempting to cover this via Twitter and iPhone (there’s no wi-fi). Follow me at Twitter where I’ll be tweeting updates from the panel.
There is no more important battle-front in Minnesotan politics today and, unlike so much else, this has a very real impact on thousands of Minnesotans down on their luck. For those of you who can’t join us in Bloomington, please share your knowledge and experiences in the comments.
I only wish I could believe
this:
The biggest issue the Legislature traditionally addresses in an even-numbered year could be completed within the session’s first three weeks.
At a meeting of the House Capital Investment Finance Division, Rep. Alice Hausman (DFL-St. Paul) said an aggressive timeline has been agreed upon to pass a capital investment bill. (Watch the meeting.)
“There is no secret we want to do this early,” said Hausman, the division chairwoman. “If the money is out the door early we can take advantage of the entire construction season.”
That would be great, but given the DFL’s ineptitude and the GOP’s intransigence, I’m not holding my breath. My prediction: The bonding bill passes in the waning seconds of the legislative session, and then only because Pawlenty says he will refuse to hold a special session.
That’s pessimistic, I know, but that’s exactly the way things have been playing out lately. I would desperately love it if the legislature would prove me wrong.
Jeez, this guy is a disaster. It’s a good thing he doesn’t have to fun a full-length campaign. Here’s the latest from
Bluestem Prairie:
Did Mike Parry’s treatment of a former Waseca City employee trigger fears of a lawsuit? Did those fears prompt a large severance package-and was the episode yet another reason voters ended Parry’s career on the city council after one term?
Did Parry’s deletion of emails in which city busienss was conducted skirt state laws?
Here’s what it boils down to: There’s a possibility that Mike Parry had a grudge against Waseca’s Community Development Director Mark Leiferman, which led to the Director’s firing and a substantial severance package being paid. Here’s the kicker, though: While someone on the Council had a grudge, we’ll never know if it was Parry, because like his infamous Twitter messages, he deleted all emails having to do with Lieferman.
This is a really disturbing pattern of Parry’s — he thinks he can somehow paper over his words and deeds by pretending they never happened.
The full story from Bluestem Prairie is worth a read, particularly because there’s more to come.
A DFL victory in the 2010 gubernatorial race may just have gotten a lot easier, as
Joe Repya has just announced he will seek the Independence Party endorsement. Does that name sound familiar?
This is probably the reason:
Repya’s only previous brush with elective office came in 2006 when he mounted a challenge for chairmanship of the state GOP, a contest he lost. Repya questioned the party’s financial dealings and management style at the time.
A Repya candidacy in the general election could seriously split the conservative vote. In short, it could do to the GOP what the IP has so often done to the DFL.
Now, I don’t want to over-emphasize this, because the last thing I want to see is the DFL candidate counting on a fractured Republican party to put him or her over the top. The DFL needs to pick a candidate that can legitimately contend for a majority of the vote, not a plurality. We will win by out-hustling and out-campaigning the GOP candidate. I’d certainly be glad of an IP spoiler, but a DFLer who counts on that spoiler to lead him or her to victory will be in for a nasty surprise come November.
There are a few reasons the MNGOP is more successful than the numbers suggest they should be. That is, for a state that remains fairly liberal on paper, we tend to elect Republicans surprisingly often. One reason is that they always tend to winnow the field way, way faster than the DFL. Let’s take a look at the state of this year’s gubernatorial race.
On the GOP side, as Matt has written, it looks like it’s Seifert. It already looks like that, and it’s going to require a pretty big game-changer to dislodge him. On the DFL side, who the heck knows? There are a few heavy-hitters, but no front runner, and several candidates with deep pockets (and a couple without) have already committed themselves to fighting up through the primary.
Meanwhile, Seifert will sit back for the next 7 months and raise money for the general election. He’ll have time to run a few positive ads, defining himself without any organized opposition to beat him to it. And you can be sure he’ll be ready to go on the attack against whoever wins the primary.
With Seifert off to a huge head start, things are going to get a lot trickier for the DFLers.
People Are Shouting
RSS