By JON TEVLIN, Star Tribune
June 13, 2009
At Al's Corral in South St. Paul, they are selling T-shirts in honor of their local "Home Town Hero," but it's not Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who grew up nearby.
The shirts are for Pete (The Pain) Donaldson, a karate fighter. When it comes to making locals feel the pain, however, Donaldson has nothing on the governor. Just ask City Administrator Stephen King, who fittingly has a horror story to tell.
"We're one of the state's basket cases," King said.
Pawlenty has unallotted his hometown out of its workingman's plaid shirt and down to its skivvies, according to King, by transferring the burden of government from the state level to the cities.
Pawlenty likes to remind potential voters of his blue-collar roots in South St. Paul every chance he gets. He even mentioned fondly the pizza at the Croatian Hall there during his recent announcement that he wouldn't seek another term. The Croatian Hall, Pawlenty said, is where he learned that "there is inevitably less joy and more trouble in too much pizza or too much beer."
People aren't worrying about overdoing it on either in South St. Paul at the moment -- many would settle for a single slice of pepperoni and a can of Schlitz. It also turns out that Pawlenty's memories of the pizza are about as fanciful as his notions that he's for the "Sam's Club" working man. The only pizza served at the Croatian Hall is the frozen kind.
As a friend of mine who grew up with Pawlenty likes to say, the governor grew up in a blue-collar household, "but he was kind of like Alex Keaton on Family Ties," a character who rebelled against his liberal parents and idolized Milton Friedman and Richard Nixon.
It's that Pawlenty who gift-wrapped a holiday present for his hometown in December: a $354,804 unallotment. If Pawlenty's expected cuts for the next two years come to pass, the city will lose another $480,638 in 2009, then absorb a $1,003,655 cut in 2010, according to King. From 2003 to 2008, Pawlenty slashed the city's Local Government Aid a similar amount.
"We've already tightened our belts," King said. "Now we're looking at cutting very basic services. Because of the meat-related industry, people [used to make] good money and paid their taxes and the standard of living was good. People grew up with expectations in regards to services."
The city now has 20,000 fewer residents than it once did, meaning a shrinking tax base. Officials like to call the city's housing "affordable," which in South St. Paul's case means relatively old and cheap. Because the property tax base is so small, raising those taxes 1 percent would only bring an extra $65,000 for the city. To make up for the millions already lost and the cuts to come, the city would have to impose an eye-popping property tax increase.
While Pawlenty has criticized city officials who have complained that budget cuts force reductions in public safety, King says it's already happened in South St. Paul. The city budgeted two new police hires for 2009 to help deal with increased gang activity and property crime. The unallotments caused the city to cancel the hires.
"Every department has been economizing as much as we can," King said. "It's a nice place; we should have a brighter future than we do."
To paraphrase what the governor said on a radio show as he pondered his next job: "This is not the United States of America that we know and love and remember."
You could say the same about the South St. Paul that Pawlenty grew up in.
"He's really not a presence here," King said. "The thing is, the philosophy he represents is unfortunately harmful to us."
King stresses he is not speaking for the city when he criticizes Pawlenty.
"So many of his comments about cities are dismissive and irritating," he said. "He basically accuses us of being whiners, and it's frustrating when we've done some really creative things to keep spending down. At the end of the day, you have to provide services -- not Cadillac services, but very basic every-day needs. It's not accurate to just say, 'no new taxes' and then transfer the burden."
Pawlenty likes to pretend he doesn't have a plan to run for president, a notion that makes people in South St. Paul spit out their booya; he hasn't become a regular on the Rachel Maddow Show (which reaches a maximum of 13,000 Minnesotans) because he has a crush on her.
If Pawlenty mounts a presidential campaign in 2012, it'll be just about the same time that South St. Paul is feeling the full effects of budget cuts, according to King.
And it'd be about the same time the national media will start walking the streets of South St. Paul, trying to gauge just how much people there love Sam's Club Tim.
jtevlin@startribune.com • 612-673-1702
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