Editorial: Pawlenty is playing with fire

Published 8:41 am Tuesday, March 16, 2010

If Gov. Tim Pawlenty wants to save some cash, and we all know he does and should make every effort to do so in these tough economic times, he needs to look somewhere other than our state’s fire departments. To arbitrarily throw out a nice round number like $10 million to cut from the firefighters training fund is absurd. If he needs to vacuum out some money from the fund, fine, but $10 million? Surely there are other areas where he and the Legislature can find money to help pay off the deficit.

“I think there’s other places to be cutting that money,” Marshall Fire Chief Marc Klaith said. “I feel for the state and understand we all have to tighten our belts, but we still have to address the public safety issue. People just have to feel safe. And I don’t want my firefighters to get injured because they don’t have the proper training. It’s tough.”

Pawlenty’s proposal calls for $3 million to be shifted out of the training fund’s current $4 million surplus with the rest a transfer from its fund balance. The $10 million would be applied to offsetting the state’s nearly $1 billion budget deficit, part of a much larger package of cuts that Pawlenty has asked state lawmakers to consider.

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The fund is fueled by a 0.65 percent surcharge paid by homeowners, in place since 2006, when Pawlenty signed it into law.

Pawlenty is already planning to gouge rural Minnesota with massive Local Government Aid cuts, now he wants to take directly from our firefighters — volunteers who risk their lives, and take time away from their families to help others?

“We lose about a firefighter a year in this state, and the volunteers are dying disproportionately,” said Nyle Zikmund, head of the legislative committee for the MN Fire Chiefs Association. “All they want is money for training. Out in southwest Minnesota, you think all the volunteers are trained up on ethanol fires, plus you have all that huge farm equipment what about rescues? It’s really disappointing.”

Zikmund joked that perhaps small-town firefighters can start selling popcorn on the street corner or building lemonade stands to raise some extra dough. Funny stuff, but it’s no joke — it might just come to that. That’s why it’s all the more important in today’s economy for communities to rally around their fire departments when it comes to fundraisiers and other events that support their local fire departments.

Minnesota, Zikmund said, is ranked 47th in the nation by the Minnesota Taxpayers Association in the amount of money it spends on its service.

Sad. “We’re an incredibly efficient model, but what more does the fire service have to give?” he said. “All they want is some training so they can be safe and go home to their families.”

— Independent of Marshall, March 9