City feeling better about cuts in aid
Published 12:00 am Saturday, May 31, 2003
It is finally final.
Local government aid (LGA) statewide was determined late Thursday night after months of debate and worry.
Albert Lea will take a $1,046,547 cut in their LGA for 2004, cutting their aid from $6,404,930 to $5,358,383.
The anticipation of the final amount has been wearing on city leaders. In January, Gov. Tim Pawlenty proposed a $3.5 million cut, which city officials were sure would cut into essential services.
&uot;It would have changed things in Albert Lea dramatically,&uot; Paul Sparks said. &uot;That could have easily taken out the fire department.&uot;
But the numbers that Pawlenty had based the cuts on used a formula based each city’s revenue from 2000. In that year, in an aberration, the city received $10 million from the state for overpayments on police and fire pensions. City officials expected that those numbers would change, but weren’t sure they would do so significantly.
&uot;We felt we were going to have to make draconian cuts,&uot; Sparks said.
With the new numbers, city officials are feeling better.
&uot;It’s better than we first thought,&uot; Sparks said.
Sparks said the city will still have to make cutbacks, but that they will be far less noticeable than the ones the other proposals would have forced.
&uot;We will be looking at ways to increase revenue,&uot; Sparks said. &uot;We already have cut a lot. We probably can’t cut much of anything without cutting some services.&uot;
Sparks said the city would look at raising fees, and possibly creating more utilities to increase revenue, such as a street light utility or a storm sewer utility that has been discussed.
&uot;City employees will be working on a balanced budget with these numbers over the next few months,&uot; Sparks said. &uot;They’ll probably be ready to hand the city council a recommendation by August. The council can then change the plan how they want.&uot;
Sparks said he was disappointed in the unfairness of the cuts in regards to rural cities versus suburban cities, saying the decision to cut high amounts of LGA will translate into greater disparities down the road between the services offered in rural communities versus the ones given in suburban communities.
But Speaker of the House Steve Sviggum, in Albert Lea as part of a statewide tour Friday, defended the decision. &uot;First of all, the amounts we are cutting right now are probably no different than the great bump in the amount received in 2000.&uot;
The state increased the amount of LGA dramatically in 2000, but in the process took away tax-levying rights, basically taking away a city’s ability to make its own money.
The speaker added that suburbs don’t get much money from the state in the first place.
&uot;When you reduce state funding you can only do it for people who get it,&uot; Sviggum said, defending the few cuts in suburban areas versus the large ones throughout outstate Minnesota.