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04/26/2005: "What would you do with $28 million a year?"

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The tooth fairy left Hennepin County $28 million dollars under its pillow!

I have just been reading about how easy it is for Hennepin county to get an extra $28 million dollars. It is just 3 cents on $20, or $30 on a 20,000 Camry. I mean it might as well be found money. The argument is, how stingy can you get. You spill more than that out of your wallet every day. Let us have our sports stadium, puulleeesssse…

Well I like baseball, and I even like outdoor baseball more, but really, it doesn’t take much of a genius to understand that the real monetary winner here is the owner of the Twins. Nick Colman had an excellent article about that in the Rats Fib oops I mean the Start Trib, on the 26th.

Everyone is on board it seems, the Newspaper, the Chamber of commerce, the County Board, the City of Minneapolis, if only those unreasonable legislators would stop pontificating and just give us our stadium.

Well I don’t mean to be a fly in anyone’s ointment (well maybe I do) but lets just think about what $28 million could buy us.

The Minneapolis School Board’s budget was cut this fiscal year by 14 million dollars, and that has led to significant layoffs of teachers, teacher aids, custodial staff, support staff and other needed employees. Since the rest of Hennepin county does not have the enrollment that Minneapolis does, I am assuming their budget loss can’t total more than Minneapolis, so I am claiming (and no lightning has struck me) that ….

For $28 million dollars (a year) Hennepin County could make up the state cuts in the budgets of every school district in the county! I could support that.
What else could we do– well there are about 15,000 children born in Hennepin County each year. For $28 million dollars we could give each child a gift of about $1,800 to start their savings towards their future life. Kind of a youth endowment.

Lets really get creative here.

There are 90,000 people below poverty in Hennepin County. For $28 million dollars a year we could hire 10% of them at 30,000 per year each, for a Conservation Corp of 9,000 people to do public works in the city. Improve parks, create artworks, clean up the streets, work with youth activities, do day care, etc. Or we could hire 20% of them at $15,000 per year.

In fact, I am giving a contest give me a suggestion of how to spend our extra $28 million dollars. The winner will get a free signed copy of my book “Road Repair”. Who knows, you might even get your suggestion implemented.

Well you get the point. If it is so easy to raise $28 million dollars, then why do we have so many unmet needs? The answer is, of course that nothing is free, especially not $28 million dollars. Sales tax costs money, and everything you spends adds up. I have been teaching my kids this and I would hope that the government and the local media would stop undermining my efforts.

I have believed for a long time that the demise of the new car dealerships, appliance stores and other large ticket items on Lake Street stem from the additional city sales tax.

When the cities buys bonds (borrows money) there are other costs. They are borrowing 353 million dollars for 30 years. That means we will pay $28 million a year for 30 years. That totals about 840 million dollars. Since the principle will be only 350 million then the interest and fees must amount to about 490 million dollars. We will pay this 490 million dollars to investors who will not have to pay taxes on that income. (That’s the way that tax exempt bonds work). So you and I, who don’t buy tax exempt bonds, will have to make up the difference in the state and federal taxes not paid on this 500 million dollars. Think about it, this is real money.

I am opposed to fleecing low and moderate income people to make millionaires and billionaires richer. I believe a stadium should be paid for by the people who watch and earn their living off the game. Raise ticket prices, use some of the income from corporate boxes, naming rights, concessions, television and radio revenues, perhaps even the owners and the millionaire players could make 5% less. The only thing keeping this from happening is greed, avarice and the fear that other cities might get the same idea and the taxpayers golden teat might dry up.


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I will give out as many prizes and I believe there are deserving entries.
All decisions of the Judge (that would be me) are final!

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