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Don Heinzman
ECM Editorial Contributor
In the decade ahead, community leaders will have to be imaginative to hold on to their community’s uniqueness, because they will get less state aid.
Failure to keep its golf courses, parks, community centers, art centers and ball fields – all those quality of life builders – will result in boring, fenced-in neighborhoods surrounded by big box stores.
Minnesota, long known for its innovation and unpredictable politics, could be unallotted by a conservative mindset that wants to cut local government aid to the bone rather than raise a tax dollar.
The challenge for many communities will be to do the same with less. Many city leaders are not figuring LGA into their future budgets.
Faced with no state dollars and an over-burdened property tax, local leaders will scale back the unique qualities of life that distinguish them, such as closing libraries, parks and pools.
For years we’ve been saying each community is different, but combining police, fire and ambulance departments will bring about a system of cars and ambulances with lights flashing looking for addresses they’ve never heard of.
Combined street departments, with snowplows driven by drivers not knowing the area may never find your cul de sac.
This resistance to combining to save dollars isn’t a matter of pride and whose city emblem is on the police door, it’s a matter of having important services close to home.
Most at stake is the educational systems particularly K-12 education, struggling under a financial system that does not and cannot give every kid equal dollars to get an education.
Those who want school administrators’ heads have no clue on how powerless school boards are and how understaffed schools are to educate students to compete not just in America but in the world.
The No-Child-Left-Behind law is a joke. This system, which places so much emphasis on testing, has consequences that could destroy good schools with good staffs, leaving many children behind.
The budget cutters at the state level will look at all those human services and insist that funding help for human needs, particularly caring for the elderly, is not sustainable. Cuts will be made on Medicaid that funds well over half the budgets of nursing homes.
Look for conservatives to take over some legislative leadership positions in 2010 and look for no tax increases, no progress and some cookie-cutter communities.
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