Forum News Services columnist Mike McFeely has written the column we'd been thinking about after reading the umpteenth rural Minnesota legislator's constituent mail about how the people he or she represents shouldn't have to pay for anything the Evil Metro needs.
In You know the metro area subsidizes rural Minnesota, right? he observes:
Punishing Minneapolis, including its businesses, makes for good politics in outstate Minnesota. Republicans, interested more in obtaining power than actual governing, are more than willing to play the game.
There's a fight in the Legislature over whether state aid should be doled out to Minneapolis to help local businesses recover from last year's riots inspired by the killing of George Floyd.
Republicans screech "no," and that DFL politicians like Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey need to clean up their own mess.
Walz, rightly, says the state needs a vibrant Minneapolis and so the aid is necessary.
"But why should MY tax dollars subsidize the big city?" scream rural taxpayers.
The answer is simple.
Because metropolitan area tax dollars subsidize you, rural Minnesota, and has for decades.
The seven-county metro area, including Hennepin County in which Minneapolis is located, have long paid far more in tax dollars than it receives back in state investment. We're talking education, infrastructure, roads, the whole shebang.
You know those shiny new water treatment plants that outstate cities build with bonding bill dollars? The majority of that tax money comes from the Twin Cities metro.
You know those miles of County State Aid Highways in your area that you use, probably every day? Those city slickers in the metro area, including the liberals in Minneapolis, pay for those, too.
Republicans know all this, of course. Legislative research has long revealed the disparity between what the metro pays and what it gets back. But it's not good politics for a rural Republican like Sen. Julie Rosen of Fairmont [link added] to admit it, so she says things about Minneapolis like, "I've heard over and over again from greater Minnesota, from my constituents: 'Please do not pay for this out of our taxpayer dollars.'"
A 2011 legislative study, already a decade old, showed that Hennepin County paid out $64 million more in taxes that went to roads than it got back. Ramsey County (St. Paul) paid out $20 million more. The story was the same for all the metro counties. They paid out far more than they received.
And rural Minnesota? Sixty counties, all nonmetro, received more tax money for roads than it paid. Martin County, Rosen's home territory, received 153% of the money it contributed. . ..
Read the rest at any Forum Communications newspaper in the state.
Photo: Until recently, Rosen lived in rural Vernon Center, in Blue Earth County, as we reported last June for the Minnesota Reformer in Where does state Sen. Julie Rosen live?. Here's a road in Martin County leading into Fairmont, via WCCO.
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