MN2020: Journal

Minnesota 2020 Journal: Take a Mulligan?

Fri, 18 May 2012 11:00:30 +0000

By John Van Hecke, {related_entries id="article_author_blogger"}John Van Hecke, Executive Director & Fellow

Minnesota’s 2012 legislative session was, in public policy terms, underwhelming. Maybe we should take a Mulligan, pretending that it didn’t happen and try it again.

Broadly, Minnesota’s legislature spent most of the session futzing with right-wing social-agenda items before finally and reluctantly tackling Minnesota’s pressing infrastructure needs. Even that was underwhelming.

Legislators added a second proposed constitutional amendment to this fall’s ballot. The first, passed last year, would ban gay marriage via constitutional prohibition making it somehow more illegal than the current state law making gay marriage illegal. This session’s amendment would restrict paths to voting, narrowing Minnesota’s successful voting tradition. Both of these proposals easily passed the conservative controlled state legislature. The process bypasses Governor Dayton’s engagement which is why they’re proposed constitutional amendments and not laws.

The legislature spent time considering several other conservative boilerplate ideas—Right to Work, Shoot First, and a number of union busting proposals. None manifested as constitutional amendments. Several were passed as bills but were vetoed by Governor Dayton.

That pretty much left capital investments, better known as the state bonding bill. Simultaneously, legislators worked on the Vikings stadium and State Capitol restoration financing. In varying fashions and to no one’s satisfaction, all passed. Using public revenue, Minnesota will build a professional football stadium; make fewer non-football stadium capital investments than we responsibly need; and, effectively, only made a down payment on the fixing up the deteriorating State Capitol.

With lots of right-wing agenda chasing and the low-end of capital investment commitments, you’d think that conservatives would be pleased with themselves and their elected officials. Nope. Conservative activists are in a punishing mood. They’ve saved their greatest ardor for their own.

Earlier this week, underscoring the feeling of betrayal and disappointment, conservatives in conservative State Senator Julianne Ortman's (R-Chanhassen) district blocked her Republican endorsement for re-election. Ortman chairs the Senate Tax Committee. In my mind, she’s a reliably conservative voice, actively working to advance the conservative public policy agenda. But, in the context of the right versus the extreme right divide, she’s apparently not conservative enough. Consequently, she’s seeking re-election without party endorsement. She’s not the first legislator to experience activist backlash and I suspect that she won’t be the last.

This action decreases rather than increases the odds of finding common public policy ground. The deeply conservative, reactionary, no-government-is-good-government crowd won’t truck with a lot of nonsense like supporting a bonding bill or voting for, you know, legislation that meets public needs.

By all reports, it was a tense convention. According to the Chanhassen Villager, one of Ortman’s party endorsement rivals said,“ It was a ‘stab in the back’ to conservatives that Republican majorities in the state House and Senate didn’t cut back more on spending.”

I can’t help but conclude that extreme conservative activists have lost touch with Minnesota’s reality. While Minnesota’s schools slip, roads deteriorate, healthcare costs skyrocket and job growth lackadaisically putters along, the conservative policy solution proposes investing even less in schools, transportation, healthcare and economic development. That solution may please the angry eight percent but it’s doing nothing for the rest of Minnesota.

Even as I express my disappointment in this legislative session’s outcome, I understand that right-wing conservatives will never be satisfied. Whatever moderates or progressives propose, conservative activists seek to stop or undermine it. Finding common ground with the nothing-not-now-not-ever crowd becomes a genuinely difficult undertaking.

This also doesn’t mean that progressives should sit back and chuckle at conservative dysfunction. It wasn’t a great legislative session. I don’t think that it was even a good session. I only know that conservative public policy dictates are derailing Minnesota.

If Minnesota’s policymakers focus on what really matters—strong schools, affordable healthcare, robust roads and bridges, and growing jobs—Minnesota moves forward. Physical and intellectual infrastructure create opportunity, grow communities and support families. Declining schools, crumbling roads, skyrocketing healthcare costs and low-wage jobs undermine Minnesota’s prosperity.

Minnesota still owes public schools more than $2 billion for unilateral funding shifts that held back education money so that the State could balance its budget. Legislative leaders could’ve worked to address this problem but they chose instead to attack teacher tenure rules and undermine local school board authority.

The same leaders could’ve bonded for an additional half billion dollars to recapitalize Minnesota’s aging roads and bridges, an investment that we’ll have to make sooner rather than later. Instead, they voted to put peace officers at greater risk by passing a Shoot First bill.

It’s unrealistic but maybe this is the moment to take a Mulligan. Let’s have a legislative session do-over, addressing Minnesota’s real needs. It’s not glamorous but it’s what’s needed.

Minnesota 2020 Journal: The Prodigal Stadium

Fri, 11 May 2012 11:00:05 +0000

By John Van Hecke, {related_entries id="article_author_blogger"}John Van Hecke, Executive Director & Fellow

Consider the Parable of the Prodigal Son as a public policy lesson for Minnesota’s legislators.

A young man, the younger of two sons, approaches his father, seeking his inheritance. Give me what is mine, the young man demands. Give me what is mine, now. The father complies.

The young man leaves his home, traveling to a different land—let’s say France—and promptly spends his fortune on bacchanalia. He parties away his money, finding himself destitute in a time of famine. Discovering that his party friends were friendly only as long as the wine flowed, the young man takes menial labor. It’s tough going.

The young man works as a swineherd, feeding and caring for hogs. In the Jewish tradition, hogs are unclean so the story takes extra steps to emphasize the young man’s complete and utter fall. There’s hitting rock bottom and then there’s hitting rock bottom and slopping hogs.

The young man’s thoughts turn to his family and his former home life. He realizes that his father treated workers better than the young man’s employer treated the young man. Chastened, the young man resolves to return home. Brimming with shame, the young man arrives at his father’s house. Father, he says, I have wronged you and wronged our family’s tradition. I cannot be your son but please accept me as a servant.

The father would have none of it. He’d spotted his son trudging home and immediately prepared a celebration. You have returned, he tells the young man, and I am overjoyed.

As the feast kicks into gear, the father’s older son unhappily confronts his father. The father’s actions, the older son insists, are unjust. I did not leave you, as my brother did. I worked hard and obeyed you. Now, you’re roasting a calf in his honor. That’s not fair. I’ve been loyal and honest. My brother turned his back on us. Now, you reward him.

Yes, the father replies. You are honest and loyal. All that I have is yours. But, don’t miss the point. Your brother was lost and now is returned. We are together again. That’s reason enough to celebrate.

Like all good parables, the lesson is equally obvious and obscure which is why it’s applicable to Minnesota’s public policy debate. The Prodigal Son is a parable of loss and redemption. Minnesota’s policy debate may have been derailed by partisan division but it can be redeemed.

Bipartisan public policy making is possible. I know this because I watched the Vikings stadium deal pass a widely divided State Legislature. If we focus on what’s really important—schools, jobs, healthcare and roads—policymakers can find bipartisan agreement.

Regardless of your position on the professional football stadium’s public investment component, recognize that its passage is a bipartisan achievement. Supporters diligently kept the deal on track despite considerable efforts to derail it. In fact, I believe that stadium opposition failed in substantial part because it lacked a bipartisan basis. Despite sharing a common goal, legislative opponents couldn’t find common ground.

A football stadium is not a prodigal child. The Metrodome—the last major multiuse sports facility built in this country and the functional equivalent of a 1982 Chevy Caprice—didn’t march off in an arrogant huff and blow its cash. Minnesota received 30 good years of service. But, like all infrastructure, nothing lasts forever. Communities require regular investment and recapitalization.

When policymakers set aside partisan quarrels, focusing on shared values and goals, fights tend to melt away. In the parable, the young man recognizes the error of his ways thus beginning his redemptive journey. He grows to understand his loss of connection to family and community. He fails to appreciate his family’s and community’s loss of him. That’s why he’s stunned and his brother is angered when his father enthusiastically celebrates the young man’s return. Redemption is a path not a one-way street.

We’ve stumbled. There’s no question in my mind. Minnesota has strayed from the community-strengthening elements that made our state great. Conservative public policy hasn’t worked. It’s undermining Minnesota’s collective strengths. But, we can come back. We can be redeemed.

The stadium deal is proof that bipartisan policymaking remains an option. It can become the normal way of doing things provided that policy leaders focus on community. When that happens, Minnesota moves forward. Slay the fattened calf; the prodigal son has returned.

Minnesota 2020 Journal: Tutoring Solutions

Fri, 04 May 2012 11:35:53 +0000

By John Van Hecke, {related_entries id="article_author_blogger"}John Van Hecke, Executive Director & Fellow

Minnesota’s public schools need help but not the help that ideologically-driven conservative education policy advocates champion. In conservative policy minds, every school problem is a nail requiring a big hammer delivering a crushing hammer stroke. Learning, however, isn’t a problem to be beaten into submission; it’s an opportunity to be advanced.

While I lay this issue firmly at conservative policymakers’ feet, we’re all guilty of projecting our insecurities, fears and short-comings on to schools. Rather than obstinately pursuing the conservative educational policy equivalent of strict determinism, let’s tackle, district by district, school by school, the problems in front of us.

When I was a teenager, a tornado skipped across our farm. It was a glancing blow rather than a direct hit. Tornados are blunt phenomena so the distinction is somewhat academic. The next morning, we faced a dispiriting, financially paralyzing mess.

Neighbors materialized, helping mend or replace fences, round up spooked cattle and pile storm debris. No one debated a great plan or argued over purpose. The task was clear and unambiguous. Everyone in my rural community was affected by that storm, understanding that the next one could very well sweep through their farm or town. Everyone pitched in.

That experience remains permanently fixed in my psyche and the aftermath’s lessons guide my personal and public policy thinking to this day. Lesson one: community is strength. Lesson two: work the immediate problem.

Imagine the outcome if Minnesota’s public policymakers applied this approach to education’s challenges?

Let’s start with learning, schooling’s elemental activity. Kids are natural learners but every kid doesn’t learn all subject matter in exactly the same way. This is not a startling development. Educators have understood this for as long as there have been teachers.

Teachers employ multiple, overlapping teaching strategies, casting a wide instructive net. Instruction is reinforced through worksheets, discussion, group work, student presentations and homework. But, not every student grasps every lesson every time. Kids periodically need extra help.

Teachers provide a great deal of students’ additional assistance but, even without steadily rising class sizes, extra tutoring is required. That’s where tutors come in.

Many Minnesota schools rely on volunteer tutors. But, not all tutors are created equal, even if they’re generously volunteering their time.

The best tutoring occurs in context with the student’s instructional material. Encouraging students is important but it’s no substitute for effective tutoring. Poor tutoring can undermine rather than support student learning.

In the 19th century, as American cities’ population rocketed, concentrated poverty’s negative social impacts became publicly recognized. Determined to do something positive, alleviating misery, wealthy and upper middle class women embraced a structured, organized poverty intervention strategy. “Friendly visiting” paired wealthy women with poor women in the hopes that wealthy women might encourage and inspire poor women to structural change. So inspired, the thinking went, poor women would simply stop being poor.

It didn’t work. Good intentions without rigorous methodology and fundamental public policy change, backed by public investment, can’t succeed. The ineffective Friendly Visiting experience didn’t just fade away. It helped establish Settlement Houses, social work as a professional discipline, and built the case for an expanding social safety net.

We’re at that point with tutoring. I’m not criticizing tutors. Quite the opposite, I herald tutoring. We need more and better tutoring. As a public policy matter, how do we move towards this goal? We work the problem.

While a great many publicity seeking conservative activists have spent the last twenty years beating up on teachers, declaring public school failure and requiring standardized tests that reinforce the conservative perspective, another, smaller group of education advocates have been improving tutoring. They’re using research, establishing evaluation and performance metrics, and contributing to the school’s larger learning community.

Saint Paul Public Schools, through the Saint Paul Public Schools Foundation, offers a great example. Best Practices for Tutoring Programs: A Guide to Quality lays out vision—the idea that tutoring is an essential component in a larger learning strategy—and roots its methodology in research. It’s a refreshing change from ideological ranting.

Minnesota’s tradition offers a clear path forward. If we work the problem, we discover and test solutions. It’s not just tutoring and schools. Studying challenges and testing and applying solutions helps create affordable healthcare, bolsters transportation infrastructure, and grows jobs. Calmly working the problem creates prosperity and opportunity.

Let’s try that.

Minnesota 2020 Journal: Bread and Circuses

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 11:00:46 +0000

By John Van Hecke, {related_entries id="article_author_blogger"}John Van Hecke, Executive Director & Fellow

Minnesota can afford a new pro football stadium but not better schools, expanded affordable healthcare, a robust transportation recapitalization schedule or economic development policy that actually creates jobs. What’s going on?

The short answer: A football stadium is decidedly less expensive than Minnesota’s schools, roads, healthcare and jobs needs. The long answer: Conservative public policy is screwing up our priorities, creating the weird disconnect that makes a stadium appear to be affordable while starving schools and communities.

Yes, you read it correctly. A pro football stadium is suddenly affordable. About the only thing missing is a car salesman in a TV spot shouting, “Our prices are so low, you can’t afford not to buy!” And, with an annual $50-55 million bond debt servicing price tag for the state’s stadium contribution, there’s some truth in the affordability declaration.

Minnesota adopted a $34 billion biennial state budget. That’s $17 billion per year. At one level, $55 million is, quite literally, a drop in the bucket. However, that annual figure risks disguising or at least discounting a long-term financial decision in order to satisfy short-term desires.

Let’s return to the car sales example. You want a new car. With the slowed economy, you’ve declined to purchase a new car, electing to stay with your perfectly good if aging orange 2003 Pontiac Aztek Rally-Edition. Yet as 150,000 miles driven tips into 160,000, those new Ford Fusions are looking better and better, even with an auto purchase loan.

So, you saunter in to the dealership, find your vehicle, negotiate a $25,000 purchase price and begin contemplating financing. Assuming no money down, a 48 month car loan at 3.5 percent creates a $560 monthly payment.

You balk at this. You were hoping to keep the loan payment south of $500 a month.

Consider stretching your loan to 60 months at the same interest rate. Suddenly, your monthly payment is $455. Hey, that’s not so bad. Suddenly, that $25,000 bill has become a number that you can not only understand but can fit into your monthly budget. If you earn the state’s median household income, $57,000, annual car loan payments of $5,500 is not outrageous.

The alternative question, however, is what could you do with money that you don’t spend on a new car as you get another year’s driving from your Aztek? That’s the long term, family financial planning and stability calculation contrasting with the short-term I-want-to-buy-a-new-car-now decision. If you’re jonesing for a new car, the modest monthly payment is a more critical decision factor than saving several thousand dollars at a virtually non-existent interest rate.

Building a football stadium is not the same as buying a new car. Not even close. Some of the same purchasing psychology is at work, however. While you may buy a new car, you’d really rather buy a new house. Your present home has lost forty percent of its value and you’re underwater on your mortgage. You owe more than your home is worth. But, you feel secure in your job and are certainly meeting your mortgage payments.

Pushing the pencil around, you discover that if you just had another $120,000, you could take the hit, sell your home and purchase a better place for less at a lower monthly payment than you’re currently paying. But, there’s the rub. You don’t have $120,000 nor do you have the prospect of finding it. So, you’re stuck in your house.

You can afford the car loan but not the larger home mortgage loan. This is Minnesota’s problem. We can afford a football stadium. We can’t afford to repay the $2.4 billion school financing shift, money promised, budgeted but not disbursed to Minnesota’s schools in order to balance Minnesota’s state budget.

Why? Because Minnesota is boxed in by conservative public policy. In refusing to consider modest tax increases, conservative policymakers have preserved tax policy that places the interests of Minnesota’s highest income earners over every other Minnesotan. The conservative no-new-taxes dictum simply moves costs from state to local, compelling communities to cut budgets and raise regressive property taxes, leaving them to deliver fewer services at higher cost.

Minnesota is experiencing the inevitable result of no-new-taxes, smaller government, conservative public policy. We’re offered short-term entertainment while Minnesota’s long-term competitiveness slips away. Building or not building a football stadium is inconsequential compared to investing in ourselves through education, healthcare, roads and job growth. If we are prosperous, entertainment will follow.

Conservative public policy is a cage, trapping us. Until we open the barred door, Minnesota won’t move forward.

Minnesota 2020 Journal: Food Deserts

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 11:00:42 +0000

By John Van Hecke, {related_entries id="article_author_blogger"}John Van Hecke, Executive Director & Fellow

I wasn’t surprised to learn that Saint Paul’s East Side lies within a food desert. I was surprised to learn that Walnut Grove, Minnesota, my home town, does too. In fact, so does much of southwestern Minnesota, home to some of Minnesota’s highest corn producing counties. Food deserts are a state-wide Minnesota issue, not an urban or rural problem.

A food desert is an area underserved by large grocery stores or supermarkets. Fewer stores create barriers to a healthy diet because fresh fruits, vegetables and greens are harder to find in smaller, convenience stores. Poverty creates and maintains food deserts as poor people, restricted by access to independent transportation and reliant on public transit, lack easy access to the elements of affordable, healthy food.

In other words, without a car, individual consumers spend more time and money traveling to and from supermarkets. Time consumption magnifies poverty as diminishing household resources are disproportionately consumed by something as simple as a supermarket run. Since jumping in a non-existent car for a twenty or thirty minute round trip is impossible, that same activity can turn into a two or three hour time suck.

Poverty reinforces poverty as a fewer options for living wage jobs, safe housing, secure neighborhoods, robust community services and affordable healthcare disappear, creating a self-sustaining cycle. Fewer options in turn minimize opportunity until the only reasonable prediction is that a multigenerational poor neighborhood will remain a poor neighborhood. The food desert is one element creating and sustaining poverty’s downward cycle.

I grew up on a farm a mile and a half south-east of Walnut Grove. During the growing season, miles of lush green corn and soybeans push up, absorbing nutrients from southwestern Minnesota’s post-glacial retreat topsoil and creating wealth. It’s one of the best places in the world to raise crops.

Every kid in my school understood the relationship between agriculture, income and community stability. Half of us were farm kids but the other half’s family incomes were inextricably tied to those blurring miles of green, regardless of occupation.

We also understood that no one actually ate the corn or soybeans growing in our parents’ fields. Those crops were sold and processed, becoming parts of a greater industrial food chain. While many people kept gardens, fundamentally, we purchased food from money earned by selling grain and livestock. My parents may have grown corn and soybeans but row crop farms, the places that grew peas, green beans and sweet corn for human consumption, were as close as the next county east. We understood it as part of the mix.

Today, just as many acres of Walnut Grove-area cropland are in production yet fewer jobs are directly linked to agriculture. Modern farming’s innovations continue driving down labor costs as technology and crop science allows fewer people to grow more grain. That shift contributes to the depopulation of rural Minnesota as disappearing ag jobs compel people to leave the area.

Even moving to a regional center like Marshall, only 30 miles distant, has a disproportionate impact on Walnut Grove. It’s not a one-to-one net loss. Marshall feels a modest marginal impact while Walnut Grove loses school-aged children, a home-owning or occupying family, and that family’s work contributions.

As Walnut Grove’s workforce shrinks, economic development opportunity ebbs away, concentrating the remaining demographic elements. With fewer families purchasing goods and services, keeping a full-service grocery store in business becomes harder and harder. Living in Walnut Grove but commuting to Marshall doesn’t improve the grocery store situation as commuters increasingly patronize Marshall’s supermarkets. Less business makes it more difficult for Walnut Grove’s grocery store to offer fresh food, accelerating a downward spiral.

Suddenly, the food desert designation makes a ton of sense.

USDA’s Food Desert Locator lets you see Minnesota’s food deserts for yourself. Understanding poverty’s isolation requires greater imagination because it’s not an easily mapped factor. Yes, the shaded pink areas are shaded because of poverty rates and relatively greater distances required to travel to a good-sized grocery stores but they don’t show poverty’s grind. Underemployment and under-education undermine a high quality, flexible and adaptable workforce, limiting future economic development. Without the workers capable of staffing growing enterprises, those businesses move, finding a workforce capable of delivering needed skills.

Fixing this problem won’t be easy. Fighting poverty never is. Intractable structural issues aren’t resolved overnight but as the food desert map reveals, with knowledge, we at least have a starting point. Minnesota has a collective interest in growing our economy, creating prosperity and mitigating poverty. Growing pockets of poverty and food deserts don’t move Minnesota forward. They only keep us down.

Minnesota 2020 Journal: Occupy Spring

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 11:00:39 +0000

By John Van Hecke, {related_entries id="article_author_blogger"}John Van Hecke, Executive Director & Fellow

Occupy Minnesota and Best Buy are each in a bind. They’re in the same bind, having everyone wondering how they’re going to move forward, remain relevant and execute on their core missions. Minnesota needs both to succeed.

Except for their obvious differences—one is a retailer and the other is a political change movement—the two organizations confront remarkably similar problems. Both are leaderless, although Occupy is leaderless by design and Best Buy is leaderless due to circumstance. Both groups have a lot people intently watching their every move, wondering whether one or both will be as relevant tomorrow as they were last year.

It’s a fair question.

Best Buy is a big box retailer. It grew from the 1981 Roseville tornado’s sweep. Disaster yielded opportunity as the stereo systems retailer rapidly shifted from a low volume/high margin business strategy to a high volume/low margin model. By the 1990s, Best Buy was a leader in big box-style retailing, building ever-larger stores to offer customers expanding product selection.

But, consumer electronics is a fickle master. Products change rapidly. Taste changes even faster. In many respects, retail electronics is a commodity, undifferentiated by any quality other than price. In other words, a TV is a TV is a TV. The particular brand matters less when every TV functions like every other TV.

When price is a retail customer’s only concern, the drive to the bottom accelerates. Best Buy was born in a post-tornado, discounted price tent sale adjacent to a storm-damaged store. As product flew out the tent flap, the company quickly brought in more stereo equipment to sell at discount. The tent became the big box. And now, the big box has become the internet. Best Buy is struggling to sell low-priced consumer electronics while paying for high visibility, high accessibility and high cost commercial real estate. Internet retailers, like Amazon, don’t pay for any of that.

Occupy Minnesota and its national counterparts are coming back to life. Like plants budding after winter dormancy, the street-focused movement is re-engaging now that it’s nice enough to be outside.

Occupy began as Occupy Wall Street, a protest movement that established a semi-permanent base in the New York City Financial District’s Zuccotti Park. New York City ordinance forbids overnight occupancy, establishing a point of conflict with city leaders. Occupy protestors used NYC’s ordinance compliance measures to increase issue visibility.

The Occupy movement has been chiefly concerned with income inequality and wealth distribution. Movement participants and organizers use direct action strategies, seeking to compel confrontation with law enforcement as a means of expanding visibility. In this regard, Occupy continues a rich tradition established by the Labor and Civil Rights movements.

Black voter registration drives of the1960s in southern states met fierce resistance. Local, elected officials either directed violent opposition by sworn peace officers or, more typically, by sanctioned vigilante action. Civil Rights leaders learned to carefully choose confrontation strategies that increased national visibility, exposing the violence used to maintain local power structures. Civil disobedience bears witness to social injustice.

The Occupy movement struck a nerve, achieving wide-spread resonance and support. The interests of a few wealthy people, encoded in state and national law, were working against the community and family stability desired by the vast majority. Asserting broad identity, Occupy’s catch phrase, “We are the 99%,” created community through income inequality’s shared experience.

But, at its core, Occupy is a street action. That’s been its great achievement and its challenge.

Occupy’s focus is economic injustice, not camping. Camping—physically occupying public space as an element of protest—is the mechanism to create public awareness of income inequality’s negative consequences. What worked last fall, in part because it was new and unexpected, won’t work this spring in exactly the same way.

Moving from protest to policy change is no small challenge. Repeatedly scuffling with the police eventually undermines public support for the protest’s goals. The tactical question—how to move forward—is inseparable from the strategic question, what do you want?

Here’s my suggestion: Press for Minnesota state policy leaders to reopen last year’s budget deal and raise taxes on Minnesota’s highest one percent of income earners. It will create a modestly small amount of increased public revenue, money that can be directed to school funding and affordable healthcare. This increase represents a balanced approach, raising taxes while cutting budgets, creates a fair, sustainable path forward toward prosperity and greater economic justice. Plus, it will deliver on Occupy’s promise.

Minnesota 2020 Journal: Flying the Distraction Flag

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 11:00:00 +0000

By John Van Hecke, {related_entries id="article_author_blogger"}John Van Hecke, Executive Director & Fellow

Hennepin County is Minnesota’s most populous county, home to roughly one of every five Minnesotans. The county sits on the cutting edge of every Minnesota community challenge, from education and affordable healthcare, to transportation and economic development. Hennepin experiences need and opportunity in equal parts.

What did Hennepin County’s elected policy leaders do recently to address that need and opportunity? They voted to stop flying the United Nations flag.

Hennepin County contains amazing wealth and undeniable poverty. While the medium household income is over $61,000 per year, twelve percent of Hennepin County residents live below the poverty line. That’s about a point and a half greater than the Minnesota average.

Hennepin County schools enroll over 150,000 students. About a quarter of Minnesota’s workforce works in Hennepin County. The county maintains 137 bridges and 561 miles of roads, a figure doesn’t include federal, state, city or county roads and bridges. A quarter of Minnesota’s businesses are located in Hennepin County.

Given this broad, challenging mix of opportunity and hurdles, a reasonable question is where to start? Yet, taking down the UN flag that flies—flew—in front of the Hennepin County Government Center appears to be a more pressing policy matter than growing jobs, reversing Hennepin County’s home value slide or creating affordable healthcare.

I only know this because Hennepin County Commissioner Jeff Johnson took a victory lap on his campaign blog, trumpeting the achievement. In fact, if Minnesota Public Radio hadn’t noticed, including Johnson’s update in their daily news post, the entire episode would’ve escaped my attention.

But, this isn’t about the U.N. flag. No, it’s a distraction from the things that really matter to Minnesotans and Hennepinians. This waste of public time, energy and attention is another play straight out of the conservative public policy distraction playbook. Rather than confront Hennepin County’s very real, very pressing challenges, Commissioner Johnson chose the tempest in the teapot. Deeply concerned that the U.N. flag’s presence somehow compromised Hennepin County’s core functions by implying county subservience to U.N. authority, he allocated considerable public time and resources to removing the U.N. flag’s offending presence.

Let me share some ideological context. To right-wing conservatives, the United Nations is seen as a harbinger of creeping, one-world socialism. Many elected and appointed conservative leaders and staff have, for years, drawn generous public pay while devoting themselves to railing against the U.N’s many ills. Commissioner Johnson, in that regard, joins a rich tradition.

According to Johnson’s narrative, the U.N. flag’s presence has troubled him since taking office in 2009. I would’ve thought that Minnesota’s unilateral state action discontinuing its efficient state-county-local revenue sharing program or the housing market’s crash or even the county’s skyrocketing unemployment rate might also have troubled Commissioner Johnson, but I don’t know his mind. I only know what he discloses on his blog.

Johnson represents one front in a multi-faceted conservative distraction strategy. Already this year, the state legislature has invested considerable public resources placing conservative social agenda items on Minnesota’s fall ballot as proposed constitutional amendments. Elected on the promise of laser-focusing on job creation, state majority caucus leaders have concerned themselves with anything but job creation.

Even local conservative elected officials have jumped on the distraction bandwagon. In 2010, the metropolitan suburban city of Lino Lakes loudly, pointedly and publicly passed an ordinance forbidding publishing public documents in any language other than English. No one had ever requested a translated document. No one, not even the ordinance’s opponents, could think of circumstance where translated documents would be requested. Still, conservative city elected leaders pushed ahead with their policy distraction.

What was achieved? The same thing that Hennepin County’s new resolution forbidding the county to fly flags other than the American, the Minnesota and the county flag on the government center’s north plaza. Which is to say, nothing.

The U.N. flag no longer flies in front of the county government center. Yet, Hennepin County prosperity isn’t growing. Average home values haven’t improved. Unemployment levels remain unmoved. Hennepin County isn’t even freer nor has its liberty quotient expanded. Public policy distractions never improve policy. Instead, they preserve the status quo, allowing pressing problems to concentrate and magnify.

Ideologically-driven distractions are a red flag, warning Minnesotans to beware that our state’s stability and prosperity are under attack. If Minnesota’s public policymakers focus on what’s really important —schools, healthcare, jobs, safety—then Minnesota moves forward. Otherwise, they’re simply perpetuating the problem.

Minnesota 2020 Journal: First, Admit the Problem

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 11:00:28 +0000

By John Van Hecke, {related_entries id="article_author_blogger"}John Van Hecke, Executive Director & Fellow

This week, State Senate conservatives passed legislation restoring some of the funding directed away from Minnesota’s public schools through the funding shifts dodge. Their action doesn’t represent a change in policy direction. Instead, it affirms a poor path, repeatedly taken, that leaves Minnesota increasingly unstable.

Pulling a five dollar bill from one pocket and shoving into the other doesn’t create a new five dollar bill. But, that’s what conservative policymakers would have us believe. Their argument goes something like this: Minnesota is running a budget surplus. We don’t need to raise taxes. Let’s spend the surplus on the schools, making up for that funding shift gimmick that we forced on them.

It’s a terrific story except that it’s misleading.

Let me set the record straight. Here’s what happened last year: Minnesota, like pretty much every state, faced another staggering state budget deficit. The legislature divided over cutting spending and raising taxes versus cutting spending and not raising taxes. After weeks of prolonged negotiation, the legislature wrapped up without passing a budget. On July 1, Minnesota government shut down.

After 20 days, state legislative leaders struck a deal with Governor Dayton, cutting spending without raising taxes. Both sides agreed to create $1.5 billion in new revenue by borrowing against projected tobacco bond revenue and pushing school funding payments into future fiscal periods. Schools suddenly received less money than they were previously told that they could expect, dispersed later than they’d been told they could expect it.

That’s a raw deal, but if it were just a one-time thing most school districts could probably swing it. Last year’s shift wasn’t a one-time fix. It was another in a succession of payment shifts. Minnesota has promised Minnesota’s schools $2.4 billion more than it has delivered, keeping the $2.4 billion to balance its own books without raising state taxes.

In the past year, Minnesota’s modest economic growth created a slightly larger than expected state revenue increase. The question of spending any surplus was established in the 2011 budget deal. Since Minnesota spent every dime in its budgetary reserve account to balance last year’s deficit, replenishing the required reserve was job one. Job two was improving the state’s cash-flow account from drained to something. Job three uses any additional surplus funds to begin repaying the school transfer fund shift.

Remember, the shift isn’t really a shift; it’s an I-O-U forcing schools to suddenly do the same teaching job with less money.

The problem? Jobs one and two are still mostly absorbing the revenue surplus. Minnesota has paid $323 million to the schools, leaving the state with another $2.4 billion outstanding. The conservative proposal allocating another $430 million to the schools would draw funds from the state budget reserve. That will leave Minnesota underfunded again, raising borrowing costs due to the structural reserve shortfall.

This proposal is the equivalent of transferring a balance from one high-interest credit card to another high interest credit card. It creates the illusion of responsible governance when the opposite is true.

The past decade taught Minnesotans that living paycheck to paycheck while running up progressively larger credit card bills only leads to heartbreak and financial calamity. The only thing worse is trying to game the system by moving one large credit balance to a new or different credit card. The debt remains, stubbornly persistent yet this is exactly what Minnesota’s conservative policymakers want to do.

Two profoundly different philosophies operate in Minnesota’s state capitol, reflected in two profoundly different public policy orientations. One views government suspiciously and skeptically, a barely necessary evil that requires regular slaying. The other sees government as an instrument of people’s collective will for security, stability and prosperity.

The conservative vision puts Minnesota’s highest income earners’ interest ahead of middle and lower-income earners’ interests. It favors the one percent over the 99 percent. We see this preference in conservative policymakers refusal to raise taxes on the wealthy, bringing their tax burden to the same level as lower income earners pay. Instead, Minnesota’s legislative leaders resort to funding shifts, budget gimmicks and high cost, short term borrowing pretending to be something other than what it is.

This has to stop. Balancing needs and desires with revenue forecasts requires brutal honesty. State policymakers have fallen into the trap of pretending. They’re kidding themselves that Minnesota’s fiscal position is stronger than what it is.

Twelve-step addiction treatment programs teach a simple, powerful approach. First, admit that you have a problem. Minnesota has a problem. We can fix it, creating a path forward by focusing on what really matters. Spending money that we don’t have available only perpetuates the problem.

Minnesota 2020 Journal: Sustainability. Oorah!

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 11:00:00 +0000

By John Van Hecke, {related_entries id="article_author_blogger"}John Van Hecke, Executive Director & Fellow

Sustainability is everyone’s responsibility. Reducing energy consumption while making tangible, irreversible progress in achieving energy independence through clean, sustainable energy generation isn’t a lofty public policy objective. It’s a necessary, immediate response to current and future conditions.

Sustainability is everyone’s reward. We live better, longer and more rewarding lives. We live with more, rather than fewer, options. We live freer with a greater sense of security knowing that shared sustainability creates stable families, communities, states and countries.

Every day that we wait without changing Minnesota’s policy direction is a day lost. Every day lost contributes to poor policy’s negative, cumulative affect. Making up lost ground and lost time becomes progressively harder.

The sustainability argument is gaining currency. It’s calmly yet enthusiastically championed by the least likely of champions. The US military is completely on-board with a clean, sustainable energy agenda.

In a compelling policy paper, A National Strategic Narrative, published by Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the US military jumps, feet first, into the sustainability debate. American defense, the paper argues, requires an entirely different policy orientation, rooted in energy sustainability.

The solution lies in recognizing global risks flowing from economic interdependence, competition for scarce resources, and the consequences of unsustainable 19th and 20th century energy generation and consumption practices. Understanding this, we must act accordingly, changing the way that we produce and consume energy. It’s a tall order but one that lies within our grasp.

The policy paper was written by “Mr. Y,” a pseudonym for Navy Captain Wayne Porter and Marine Corps Colonel Mike Mykleby, strategic assistants to Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike McMullen. The “Mr. Y” choice is an homage –a knowing salute- to US diplomat George Kennan’s enormously significant 1947 Foreign Affairs journal article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” Kennan drew from his State Department policy brief written a year earlier, proposing that the United States contain Soviet Union activities, anticipating that rational, national objectives would eventually supplant the USSR’s foreign policy driven by paranoid, internal leadership power struggles.

Because post-WWII US foreign policy regarding the USSR was an open question, Kennan and the journal obscured Kennan’s senior diplomatic corps role by publishing as “Mr. X.” President Truman ultimately embraced Kennan’s suggestion. Containment doctrine, in various forms, guided US foreign policy for the next 40 years.

In their paper, Porter and Mykleby address the post-USSR and post-containment doctrine world. They suggest a clear policy shift. It’s right there in their paper’s first theme, “From containment to sustainment: control to credible influence.” Their idea in brief? What worked then won’t work now.

From national security to family security, we are stronger when we work together towards greater energy independence. Containment doctrine was possible for a natural resource and energy rich United States with the ability to tap energy sources from other parts of the world. A growing world with its increasing appetite for energy competes with our nation’s consumption. The old energy model assumes that cheap, readily available energy will be cheap and readily available forever. It won’t.

Minnesota has no oil wells, natural gas fields, coal mines or local sources of fissionable material. Energy generation’s fuel flows to Minnesota from other states and nations. Minnesota, like the US, has every incentive to move towards greater energy independence. What’s the hold-up?

First, current energy generation systems are deeply entrenched. They provide reliable power at modest cost. That’s no small achievement but rising fuel costs and rising energy demand are changing that stasis, dragging traditional energy generators into this century.

Second, anti-government conservatives oppose shifting state energy policy. Investing in new, sustainable energy technology requires public policy that incentivizes and reward change. Policy requires financial resources. Conservative policy favors legacy energy generation, preferring short term reward and profitability to long-term need and perspective.

Energy independence and sustainability can’t and won’t look the same across Minnesota, much less across America. Wind power works best in Minnesota’s windiest stretches. Solar panels won’t work on every roof. We’re not going to stop using coal to generate base power load anytime soon but we must recognize that coal isn’t a path toward greater energy independence and sustainability.

Mykleby, now retired from the USMC, is in town today, keynoting the Alliance for Sustainability’s annual conference. He grew up in the Twin Cities’ suburbs and his family is from rural Minnesota. He’s an eminently practical thinker, a product of Minnesota public schools and Minnesota perspectives. His policy work resonates because it’s rooted in finding a path forward.

It’s probably too late to catch Mykleby’s keynote speech, at least live and in person. It’s not too late to read his paper. It’s not too late to change Minnesota’s energy policy direction. Sustainability is equal parts reward and responsibility.

Minnesota 2020 Journal: Lipstick on a Shutdown Pig

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 11:00:30 +0000

By John Van Hecke, {related_entries id="article_author_blogger"}John Van Hecke, Executive Director & Fellow

The way to avoid future state government shutdowns is to avoid future government shutdowns.

Let me say this again. The way to avoid future state government shutdowns is to avoid future government shutdowns. Rather than passing legislation directing specific state programs to continue functioning during a cessation of state government operations due to government funding authorization’s absence and rather than presuming biennial shutdowns, policymakers should better prepare themselves to negotiate a state budget.

Last summer, Minnesota’s state government shut down for 20 days because state policymakers couldn’t compromise on a state budget before the previous budget authorization expired. Without legislation directing Minnesota to expend public resources, Minnesota’s state government shut down.

All but court-determined essential services were closed for 20 days in July 2011. State parks closed. State permitting offices closed. State regulatory oversight offices closed. State water quality monitoring services closed. The state office collecting job-related-injury statistics closed. State highway rest-stops, along with roadside assistance, were closed. Just to name a few.

The shutdown affected every Minnesotan without exception. It affected some more directly and more immediately than it affected others but make no mistake, every one of us felt it.

As the days passed, Minnesotans grew increasingly unhappy with state policymaker intransigence. Conservative state legislative majorities refused to yield. They insisted Minnesota’s next biennial budget balance the projected revenue shortfalls through program cuts alone. Conservative policymakers rejected modest tax increases on Minnesota’s very highest income earners, the group paying a lower proportional tax rate than middle and low-income earners. Instead, they continued a pattern of shifting community program costs to local property tax payers.

The compromise was disappointing. It yielded a 2012-2013 state budget, ending the shutdown, but at considerable cost to community and family stability. By borrowing against tobacco settlement bonds’ income and by delaying school transfer payments until the start of later fiscal accounting periods and leaving schools short of promised cash, Minnesota found, in effect, a new, high-interest short-term credit card to resolve the $1.5 billion difference between Governor Dayton’s budget and the conservative legislative majorities’ budget.

Conservatives insisted then and now that the shutdown caused no harm. That thinking lays behind SF 1843, Senator Al DeKruif’s (R-Madison Lake) bill keeping state parks and rec areas open during future shutdowns. It’s the public policy equivalent of painting lipstick on a pig.

Conservative ideology dismissing government’s relevance is a self-fulfilling property. Conservatives seek public leadership roles by insisting that government is broken. Then, in office, they reinforce their conclusions by cutting or eliminating community services while further denouncing government shortcomings leading to cyclical repetition.

Except that, during the shutdown, Minnesotans began to understand that Minnesota performs many functions that people want, support and take for granted. This isn’t big government telling us what or what not to do. Rather, we’ve collectively created government to carry out our desires. Since we have different needs and perspectives, our shared desire is a mixture of consensus and disagreement.

Directing that state parks remain open during a government shutdown is an attempt to mask conservative public policy’s true goal. It seeks to direct public benefits to fewer, select people at reduced or no cost to them. It has little if anything to do with state parks but everything to do with preserving conservative tax policy favoring Minnesota’s very highest income earners over Minnesota’s great majority.

The state-parks-open-during-shutdown bill is a dodge, offered as an attempt to boost future conservative policy negotiating options. It assumes that, somehow, people won’t notice that Minnesota’s state government isn’t functioning as long as Minnesotans can continue camping and fishing in state parks. In effect, this legislation is predicated on the idea that we’re clueless.

We’re not.

During the last shutdown, people were supremely displeased with the stand-off. Yet, they recognized that Minnesota’s projected public revenues couldn’t match Minnesota’s expressed desires. A strong majority supported a balanced approach, pairing cuts with tax increases. But, that’s not what happened. A tough deal became a raw deal.

Minnesotans want strong communities. Shutdowns can’t be mitigated. When policymakers focus on what really matters to Minnesota—jobs, schools, healthcare—they move Minnesota forward. Painting lipstick on a pig doesn’t change the pig; it only reinforces the effort’s absurdity.

Minnesota 2020 Journal: Community Space

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 12:00:07 +0000

By John Van Hecke, {related_entries id="article_author_blogger"}John Van Hecke, Executive Director & Fellow

Without space, community is difficult if not impossible. Few groups understand this better than organized labor. That’s why the union hall isn’t just an operational center, it’s labor’s hub because community means creating one’s place in the world, literally and figuratively.

This idea isn’t new. People have always found ways to create community space, facilitating interaction. Sometimes community space means a gorgeous public park like Itasca or Madison’s Carnegie-endowed public library. Sometimes, it’s a large, flexible facility like the Carpenters’ Hall in Saint Paul. And, sometimes, it’s the grocery store parking lot when three people pause to discuss a neighborhood concern.

The grocery store didn’t consciously establish the store’s parking lot as community space. For the owners, a parking lot is a business cost and amenity facilitating their store. The point is to draw customers with ease-of-access. Grocery stores understand that they are community facilitators but they use a different, commercial definition of community. When three shoppers stop to discuss, say, the divisive, diversionary state constitutional amendments rolling from conservative state policymakers, those shoppers are appropriating commercial space for their needs.

This happens all the time. In fact, it’s a quiet, essential element of our democracy. Grocery stores are less keen on their space being used for political rallies or mass demonstrations—also essential elements of democracy—but those functions are infrequent.

People find ways of getting together. When communities organize for change, space becomes especially important. That five-minute neighborly exchange can lead to a 30-minute cup of coffee and deeper conversation.

When Rosa Parks’ frustration exceeded her patience, her refusal to give up her public bus seat started a chain of events that we now identify as the Civil Rights Movement. On December 5, four days following Parks’ arrest, Montgomery, Alabama, African-American community leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association to organize a one-day bus boycott. Leaders met first at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and then, on the 5th, at Mt. Zion AME Church. What began as a single-day event became a show-down.

Public facilities discrimination was a long-time source of indignation and racial segregation enforcement, quietly discussed in many different places, including Dexter Avenue Baptist. With Parks’ refusal and arrest, religious community space instantly became civil rights community space.

Less commonly known is organized labor’s role aiding the rapidly expanding Civil Rights movement. MIA co-founder E.D. Nixon was a local labor leader, active in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. He connected community leaders with state and national labor leaders, arranging for financial and organizational support. Nixon brought labor’s community to segregated Montgomery.

This past Sunday’s New York Times included a reflective essay on the Port Huron Statement, the Cold War-era student manifesto affirming democracy’s promise. Like labor’s Civil Rights movement engagement, organized labor helped create the opportunity for the Port Huron Statement. It was adopted at a Students for a Democratic Society convention, meeting at an AFL-CIO retreat facility near Port Huron, Michigan, just north of Detroit. Labor’s space, once again, created community by addressing a growing discontent with contemporary life’s direction.

Community space rarely serves social justice’s grandest events. Day in and day out, the local union hall is a community hub, engaging important but regular needs. It hosts member picnics, weddings, wakes, and serves whatever needs can be envisioned. It is a place to go for people of modest means, unable to afford access to private space. That’s precisely why the union hall is important.

Organized labor helped create our present expectation of public space dedicated to our every-day lives. We have public libraries and recreation centers. Minnesota’s public schools routinely serve communities far beyond their day-time K-12 charges. Parks of every stripe make Minnesota a better, stronger, and freer place. We take things these things for granted, assuming that they’ll always be there.

They won’t, not unless we change Minnesota’s public policy direction.

Over the past twelve years, Minnesota has moved away from the community-based values central to our state’s broad prosperity. Under conservative public policies, the interests of very high income earners trump all other considerations. Dealing with economic recession, conservative leaders rejected responsibly pairing modest tax increases with tough budget cuts. Instead, conservative policy shifted the budgetary burden to middle and low-income earners, forcing school and community budget cuts. The public suddenly had less access to community space. We are not better for it. We are worse off.

Organized labor understands that workers’ gains are never permanent. Rights must be fiercely defended because they can be lost. Minnesota’s towns, cities and counties are slowly waking to that realization. Community makes us stronger but only if we fight for it.

Minnesota 2020 Journal: Fiscal Forecast Lessons

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 12:44:14 +0000

By John Van Hecke, {related_entries id="article_author_blogger"}John Van Hecke, Executive Director & Fellow

If our economy were a movie, Minnesota would be the plucky hero, buried in a mine collapse, clawing its way back to the surface while arrogant mine owners insist that nothing is wrong with the mine. Unfortunately, Minnesota’s slow economic recovery isn’t a movie. It’s all too real with all too real consequences for Minnesota’s middle class majority.

Conservative public policy is still the bad guy, however.

On Wednesday, the Minnesota Management and Budget Office released the February 2012 economic forecast. Minnesota is running a $323 million projected surplus. Understanding that figure requires a certain amount of fiscal squinting, bringing an ugly mess into focus.

First, the really big picture. Beginning in 2008, US economic growth contracted. While this involved a variety of factors, the subprime mortgage crises and housing market collapse were dominant recessionary elements. The fallout continues manacling economic recovery.

Second, the Minnesota public policy picture. Over the past ten years, Minnesota policy direction has been guided by conservative, no-new-taxes ideology. Between Governor Pawlenty’s tenure, conservative control of the State House of Representatives for most of that time and, with the 2010 election, conservative control of both legislative chambers, Minnesota policy has changed.

Rather than continue the well-established historical pattern of community investments in people through schools, jobs and affordable healthcare, conservative policy favored tax relief to Minnesota’s highest income earners. In this same period, Minnesota tax structure decreased reliance on progressive, income tax based revenues, shifting to property tax based revenue generation. The result lessened the tax burden on the very highest income earners while increasing property owners’ share of the service funding burden.

When the recession hit and economic activity plummeted as unemployment figures jumped, Minnesota’s conservative state policy leaders began unilaterally discontinuing Minnesota’s revenue sharing agreement with communities. Known in government circles as Local Government Aid, this arrangement was an efficient mechanism for extending the state’s broad taxation authority to communities. But, it was at its core, a political deal susceptible to political power changes.

Facing declining shared state revenue, communities cut and eliminated services while raising property taxes to make up for the foresworn promise. Local leaders made the tough decisions while state leaders pursued a different, ideological agenda.

Minnesota must balance its state budget. It’s right there in the state constitution. State policymakers can’t, unlike federal policymakers, print more money. Balancing the state budget requires balancing spending against income.

This challenge is regularly revealed in school and community budgeting. Local entities have few revenue generation options beyond property tax increases. Consequently, all have pursued a balanced approach of cuts and tax increases. Minnesota state public policymakers took another path, one they’ve taken before.

Rather than embrace the balanced approach, conservative policy leaders insisted on a cuts-only budget balancing strategy. When their strategy’s social cost became too onerous, they agreed to one-time resource generation and school funding shifts. State leaders sold Minnesota’s tobacco settlement bonds, trading years of steady payments for a one-time contribution to state budget balancing. Simultaneously, school districts learned that Minnesota’s educational funds would arrive much later than promised and in smaller amounts. By pushing school payments into future fiscal periods, Minnesota balanced its budget. But, like a Vegas weekend bender charged to the credit card, Minnesota’s bill is coming due.

During Wednesday’s forecast announcement, we learned that Minnesota projects a $323 million surplus in the present fiscal cycle. We were also reminded that Minnesota faces a $1.1 billion structural deficit in 2014-2015. Add the $2.4 billion in school funding shift financial obligations and Minnesota’s fiscal future appears compromised at best.

Conservative fiscal policy is not working in Minnesota. Propelling our state’s nascent economic recovery forward requires equitably sharing the load. Policy putting the interests of Minnesota’s very highest income earners ahead of the other 99 percent is unjust. But even if you disagree with my judgment, conservative public policy direction isn’t achieving growth.

Minnesota does best when we share the burdens and share the rewards. By investing in schools, jobs and affordable healthcare, Minnesota creates competitive economic advantage. When policymakers focus on what really matters, Minnesota moves forward.

In the mine collapse movie, individual acts of bravery are buttressed by groups working together. That’s the true observation found in the state’s February fiscal forecast. We’ve come a long way, sacrificing much but we still face real and troubling challenges. It’s time to change policy to change Minnesota’s outcome.

Minnesota 2020 Journal: Deeply Unpopular

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 12:00:38 +0000

By John Van Hecke, {related_entries id="article_author_blogger"}John Van Hecke, Executive Director & Fellow

Minnesotans are displeased with their elected state legislative public policy leaders. Recent survey instruments find stunningly low public opinion. Each suggests a path forward but it’s probably not the path that present policy leaders want to follow.

Of the two opinion measuring instrument styles represented, one is a scientific survey and the other is not. That they each uncover the same sentiment suggests that Minnesotans are genuinely unhappy. If I were an elected public leader —and I’m not— I’d scramble to match my public policy proposals to Minnesotan’s strongly communicated desires.

Public Policy Polling is a North Carolina public opinion survey research firm. They use an automated phone-survey methodology to keep costs down. Survey USA and Rasmussen Reports are other well-known polling firms using the same techniques. All three organizations regularly conduct and release survey findings, stimulating public policy and political debates, as well as gleaning growing brand identity from their released information’s public dissemination value.

Traditional pollsters love to down-play automated survey instruments. And, with good reason because PPP’s publicly-released findings tend to examine broad concerns rather than narrower issues. But, that’s the point. Examining public attitudes that are best expressed through the right track/wrong track question —is Minnesota on the right track or wrong track?—opens a door into broad public sentiment.

Polling reveals perspective. The quick snap-shot, placed in the proper context, is valuable but polling’s next applicable step explores avenues for successful public persuasion strategies. That work is expensive because it’s labor intensive and time consuming. Nobody, and I mean nobody, gives that insight away for free.

PPP’s late January survey found that Minnesotans have a poor opinion of state legislators. PPP distinguished between Democratic and Republican office holders. Survey respondents held legislative Democrats in slightly higher regard than their Republican caucus counterparts but not by a ton. Dems’ disapproval weighs in at 49 percent while GOP member disapproval registers 62 percent.

A couple of weeks later, Survey USA found that Minnesotans’ opinion of the legislature was even lower than PPP’s finding, suggesting that the legislature’s first weeks’ activities diminished their performance in people’s eyes. Seventeen percent of respondents approved of the legislature’s performance, 65 percent disapproved and 18 percent either didn’t know or expressed no opinion.

That 65 percent number is startling. It’s rare that this level of frustration doesn’t translate into voter discontent at the ballot box.

Lastly, I want to interject Minnesota 2020’s current reader survey findings. This is a completely unscientific survey, conducted annually, to guide our work. Since our 2007 launch, we’ve asked the same basic group of questions, giving some longitudinal weight to our findings. We don’t pretend that our reader survey is anything other than the opinions of people who generally read us and are willing to spend five minutes completing an on-line survey.

Every year, we’ve asked this same question: “How focused are Minnesota’s leaders on the core issues important to Minnesota’s future?” Respondents have four answer options: strongly focused, somewhat focused, not very focused, or not at all focused. Even by our decidedly unscientific methodology, Minnesotans are expressing even less faith in Minnesota’s leaders than they were from 2007 to 2010.

Our respondents feel that leaders haven’t been terribly focused on core issues. This year, the “not at all focused” response spiked, jumping to 21 percent from single digits. Contemplating this increase alongside PPP’s and Survey USA’s legislative approval rates suggests that public discontent is real.

And, why not?

Minnesota’s majority legislative caucuses establish the legislature’s agenda. Rather than improving Minnesota’s economy, schools and healthcare access, leaders rolled out a series of controversial, conservative constitutional amendments. Despite the demonstrated impact of unilateral cuts in state revenue sharing, state policymakers have ignored skyrocketing property taxes, compelled by state cuts and matched by local service spending reductions.

There is a silver lining in this dark public opinion cloud. Should state policymakers choose, there’s still time to reverse course. State legislative leaders could simply abandon their constitutional amendment-as-distraction policy, doubling down on the real challenges facing our state. Working with Governor Dayton, state policymakers could create a progressive taxation structure and create some modest new state revenue. Those dollars could provide immediate school support by restoring the traditional schools funding split, dramatically saving school districts from having to borrow money to meet immediate cash-flow obligations.

That’s just one suggestion. The point is that state policymakers, pursuing an ideologically conservative policy agenda, no longer have public support for their policy path. If, instead, legislative leaders focus on jobs, schools, healthcare and roads, they’ll move Minnesota forward. Without change, however, “more of the same” will only continue proving more unpopular.

Minnesota 2020 Journal: A Better Stadium Debate

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:00:27 +0000

By John Van Hecke, {related_entries id="article_author_blogger"}John Van Hecke, Executive Director & Fellow

Minnesota policymakers are contemplating building a new football stadium for the Minnesota Vikings. Minnesotans seem to like the Vikings and value community facilities but oppose, roughly 2-1, a publicly funded stadium.

I’m a great fan of perspective. It’s worth considering other recent stadium experiences. The Indianapolis Super Bowl provides a cautionary but not project-killing tale.

Indianapolis was, for the longest time, America’s crossroads. That was true for rail and roads. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters’ headquarters used to be located in Indianapolis. Indy is on, not off, the beaten path.

That said, it’s a good tick smaller than the Twin Cities’ combined metropolitan statistical area population of 3.6 million to Indianapolis’ 2.1 million. But, the Indianapolis area grew slightly faster between 2000 and 2010. As a result, they’ve invested in lots of new infrastructure. A football stadium is only the tip of that iceberg.

Indianapolis still owes money–public money-on the RCA/Hoosier Dome football stadium torn down to build the new $720 million Lucas Oil Stadium. Indy is paying for a sports facility that isn’t even there.

The Hoosier Dome, with a billowy Teflon and cable roof, looked a lot like the Metro Dome. Aesthetically, Lucas Oil Stadium is an improvement. When the Metro Dome is eventually felled, we’ll miss the facility’s events but not the building.

But, is the Lucas Oil Stadium a good deal for Indianapolis and Indiana? Well, that depends on how you feel about zip lines.

The NFL helped nudge the new stadium by promising Indy a Super Bowl. Indianapolis, like the Twin Cities, has a lot going for it but it’s not a big tourist destination. We love living here but we’re always perplexed why anyone would visit. The same holds for Indy.

The Super Bowl’s event planners decided that Indianapolis needed more event pizzazz. Their big idea? Four parallel 800 foot-long zip lines, inside the Super Bowl Village fan-experience area for ten bucks a go. Apart from, or perhaps in spite of, the football game, the zip line was huge. It was the week’s most popular element, selling out every ticket, every day. The locals loved the zip line.

None of this has anything to do with public stadium financing, at least not directly. No one in their right mind would pour $720 million into a zip line ride backdrop. But, stadiums aren’t only about their tenant sports teams. Stadiums reflect community identity, values and principles.

Set aside the greedy owner/rich athlete oppositional argument for a moment and contemplate stadium as public facility. People have always created public gathering space. Parks are perceived differently from publicly-owned professional sports facilities but in both cases, public investment creates the space in order to achieve a public good.

Parks are shared space, reflecting a community’s commitment to accessible recreational opportunity, a contemporary manifestation of the concept of public commons. Parks are for everyone but the benefit is much subtler and wider ranging than simply providing room for weenie roasts, youth hockey and Frisbee golf. Public space raises property values. A park adjacent house is worth more than a house considerably distant from a park because of the park’s public amenity derived value.

Creating public space creates private value. Surrendering public commons to private control tends to raise the public’s hackles which is what’s happening with the Vikings stadium debate. If a new stadium is substantially publicly funded yet effective control remains in non-public hands, is that facility still public space?

Yes and no.

No, it’s not public space because I can’t freely wander around a stadium like I could in Redwood County’s Plum Creek Park. Yes, it’s public space because a community use, however imperfect, is achieved through the Vikings football franchise and accompanying community identity. Losing the Vikings would be a community loss. The policy question, however, involves determining the right amount of public investment to achieve community good.

None of this is easy. If it were, we’d have already found the solution. It’s important to start, I think, with the goal of achieving collective public good. A stadium’s imposing cost must be matched against the public infrastructure’s benefit. A stadium is one element in a much larger mix of community facilities that serve us in slightly different fashions. Just as closing a public park comes with a social cost that transcends financial concerns, a stadium’s construction costs create community value.

Minnesota needs a stadium debate that moves us forward. The conservative model of not-so-subtly sticking someone else with the bill is failing our state. A deal that builds community, puts workers to work, creates values, shares financial risk and expands infrastructure would be a heckuva zip line ride.

Minnesota 2020 Journal: The Fewer Rights Act

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:00:52 +0000

By John Van Hecke, {related_entries id="article_author_blogger"}John Van Hecke, Executive Director & Fellow

In the war of words, progressives are not doing well. Conservative activists hold the rhetorical upper hand, obfuscating their policies’ true intent and making community- stabilizing and family- strengthening achievements an up-hill slog. Why? Because we’re trying to refute their ideas with their language. In the struggle for definition, we’re not just behind, we’re somewhere between 30 and 50 years behind.

Witness HF65, the proposed Minnesota “right to work” constitutional amendment bill. It’s a case in point. This legislation undermines collective bargaining rights. It has nothing to do with work but everything to do with using the state’s power to take hard-won protections from workers. Yet, hearing the phrase “right to work” with only the words themselves for guidance, most people assume it’s a worker protection initiative.

It’s not.

That disconnect is no mistake. It’s a deliberate, purposeful manipulation of language attempting to mislead rather than enlighten or clarify. “Right to work” is just one example.

Language is not neutral. Words matter. And, in public policy debates, words are everything. Word choice conveys idea’s meaning even if that idea is meant to mislead the listener. Conservative policy advocates want Minnesotans to infer conservative policy frames from seemingly objective descriptions.

This is not a new idea. English writer George Orwell explored totalitarian dictatorship’s use of fear to manipulate and control people. Based on Orwell’s observations of the Stalinist-era Soviet Union, he explored physical violence’s extension into intimidation through language. Orwell’s novels 1984 and Animal Farm not only contributed to English literature, they expanded the English language. We regularly use the terms big brother, doublethink and thought police, and define attempts to exert control through use of vague language as “Orwellian.”

When I describe “right to work” as Orwellian, it’s not complimentary.

In the last century, the two great progressive moments were the 1930s and the 1960s. Economic hardship compelled the New Deal, President Roosevelt’s policy framework addressing economic depression and poverty, but also rhetorical shorthand for a newly emergent political and cultural alliance. Post-World War II economic prosperity challenged that alliance, propelling civil rights confrontations. Although conflicts started in the 1950s, we commonly associate these challenges with the 1960s. The federal policy umbrella addressing needs was called the Great Society.

Conservatives have always portrayed government as unnecessarily intrusive, fixating on elected executives who don’t toe a conservative policy line. That was as true for President Roosevelt as it is for President Obama. Minnesota conservatives, separated by 80 years, use the same language to pummel Governor Dayton that they used to oppose Governor Floyd B. Olson. It’s remarkable how little some of our fights have changed.

While opposing big government in principle, conservatives warmly embrace a conservative policy agenda promoting government as long as it’s their kind of government. They demonstrate remarkable enthusiasm for activist government sidelining, marginalizing or eliminating the opposition.

HF65 will undermine collective bargaining rights. A quick review of states with similar laws reveals lower incomes, fewer workplace benefits and a much greater likelihood of injury or death on the job than in Minnesota. While we could call this proposal the “Poorer, Sicker, Deader Worker Bill”, let’s label it “The Fewer Rights Act.”

This title is not misleading. HF65 seeks to remove rights, substantially weakening the organizational basis for collective bargaining. Without a representative group, people are effectively barred from negotiating together.

“The Fewer Rights Act” passes the Orwellian smell test. The title isn’t duplicitous or misleading. I’m telling you, flat out, that HF65 will result in fewer effective rights. Plus, maintaining the status quo –not passing the bill- doesn’t ominously extend the authoritarian state’s dark, controlling reach. It just means that both sides, labor and management, can afford to hire lawyers during contract negotiations.

Advocating progressive public policy, it’s important to use our words to describe our values and our proposals. “Right to Work” is conservative-speak for using state authority to limit opportunity. “The Fewer Rights Bill” language reframes the conservative attacks, revealing them for what they are.

The best defense is a good offense. We tell our stories in our words, communicating our values and goals. We’ve spent decades assuming that family strengthening and community stabilizing laws’ very presence was a sufficient bulwark against conservative attacks. They’re not. Conservatives policy advocates have never rested; we mustn’t stop either.

Minnesota 2020 Journal: Seizing an Opportunity

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:00:24 +0000

By John Van Hecke, {related_entries id="article_author_blogger"}John Van Hecke, Executive Director & Fellow

We’re experiencing a mild winter. While a nice change of pace from last year’s deluge, mild winter weather’s consequences are a decidedly mixed bag. Winter is normal in Minnesota. We need normal more than we need unusual.

The winter recreation industry is not having a great year. Without much snow cover, ski, sled dog and snowmobile races, are being delayed, relocated or canceled. Ice fishing tournaments are being called off because, unbelievably for January, thinning lake ice is too unsafe to proceed.

Farmers and gardeners are not especially pleased. Light snow accumulation stresses dormant plants that should be buried under a foot of snow for a significant chunk of the winter. Last summer’s drought continues, found in this winter’s minimal snowfall. Anticipating spring planting, winter drought only complicates the 2012 growing season. Without increased precipitation, crop yields will be down, keeping food prices high.

On the other hand, strained city, county and state snow plowing budgets welcome the respite. I’m hard pressed to recall a snow emergency this year. Community budgets, squeezed by the becalmed economy and by conservative wealth-favorable tax policy, need a break. Little-to-no snow plowing overtime creates fiscal breathing room.

What should we do with the savings?

For most communities, the state’s unilateral revenue-sharing cuts have forced tough choices. Local elected leaders cut budgets, slashed programs and raised property taxes. The mild winter’s cost savings won’t restore eliminated services but will mitigate planned additional cuts. In other words, less snow plowing might prevent further, deeper spending reductions for things like infrastructure recapitalization and investments.

Maybe we could do something smart, rooted in research and analysis rather than in conservative ideology. Roads would be a good start.

Minnesota’s road and bridge infrastructure, at every level, has been underfunded for the past ten years. While the economic recession and slow recovery decreased use, we’re still exhausting our roads’ and bridges’ capacity faster than we’re maintaining it. Yes, as any highway engineer will tell you, any rebuild decision can be put off for a year or two but not forever. Roads and bridges have functional lives. With enough time and use, they won’t function as designed.

Consider the 2007 I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis. The National Transportation and Safety Board report found that design flaws probably caused the cascading structural failure. Additional weight, present on the bridge due to a construction project, was also a likely contributing factor.

Built in 1961, the I-35W bridge was first evaluated as structurally deficient in 1990. That doesn’t mean that the bridge was at imminent risk of collapse but reflected growing concern with corrosion. Bridges, like every constructed object, aren’t eternal. They wear out. When that happens, we either replace the structure or stop using it. Since robust infrastructure is inseparable from economic competitiveness and prosperity, permanently closing roads and bridges carries powerful, community marginalizing consequences.

This year’s mild winter creates opportunity because truly mild winters –like this one, at least so far- occur infrequently. When they do, we need to move quickly. Rather than bemoan lost ice fishing time, we should be using mild weather to achieve other objectives.

If you haven’t figured it out, I’m not really talking about mild winter weather conditions. Mild winter is metaphor for low interest rates. With building and borrowing costs at all-time lows, Minnesota should seize the opportunity to expand infrastructure bonding authority, financing capital improvement projects.

Interest rates will never be this low again. Let’s bond now, paying for the road and bridge rebuilding that we’re going to rebuild anyway. We can do it at low cost to Minnesotans or we can wait until interest rates and project costs begin rising, asking Minnesotans to pay for work that we should already have completed.

By modest measure, Minnesota can afford to issue $2 billion in new state bonds. Governor Dayton proposes a $775 million package. The State Senate majority caucus has suggested $400 million while the State House majority caucus mumbles about something substantially less than that.

Most of Dayton’s investments will recapitalize existing infrastructure and public facilities. Like an unexpected, exceptionally mild winter, the combination of clear need and exceptionally low finance and construction costs probably won’t happen again in our lifetimes. Minnesota’s policymakers won’t just be foolish for ignoring this opportunity to invest in Minnesota’s infrastructure, their actions will reasonably be considered irresponsible.

Minnesota 2020 Journal: Legislative Session Distractions

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:35:27 +0000

By John Van Hecke, {related_entries id="article_author_blogger"}John Van Hecke, Executive Director & Fellow

After ten-plus years of conservative public policy, Minnesota is falling behind. We’ve placed the priorities of Minnesota’s highest income earners ahead of middle and low-income Minnesotans’ needs. We’re investing fewer state resources in schools than we were a decade ago. Our roads are crumbling because we’re not maintaining them at a rate that matches our use. Affordable healthcare, a key element in Minnesota’s business competitiveness, is increasingly eluding working families.

This is not a prescription for prosperity.

Conservative legislative policymakers want to continue this slide. Their legislative session policy priorities include a series of constitutional amendments that would permanently place poor policy in Minnesota’s constitution. Rather than tackle real problems, conservative state policymakers propose a series of extreme distractions. These represent real threats to Minnesota but, collectively, they’re designed to tie-up the legislature’s time, preserving inequitable fiscal policy. Here’s a run-down.

Minnesota bans same-sex marriage. It is illegal. Since that ban is only a law and not a constitutional amendment, conservatives seek the whole nine yards. Passing this will make same-sex marriage really, really illegal. This one is already on the fall ballot.

Whenever conservative majorities win an electoral majority, they promptly attack labor unions. For quick reference, see Wisconsin. Conservative policymakers love “right to work” legislation, using the state’s authority to restrict unions’ right to organize and collective bargaining. Workers in so-called right-to-work states earn less money, experience a lower standard of living and are at greater risk of work-related injury. Since right-to-work has repeatedly failed in Minnesota’s legislature, conservative policymakers propose by-passing representative democracy’s process, placing right-to-work punishments directly in Minnesota constitution through an amendment ballot.

More Minnesotans vote, on a per capita basis, than in any other state. Election fraud is virtually non-existent in our state. Despite this, conservative leaders want to require that voters present a state-issued photo identification card to prevent voting fraud. The voter ID proposal is truly a solution in search of a problem. This measure will lower Minnesota’s voting participation rate, spend unnecessary money and threatens our democracy. Of course conservatives think that the state constitution should be amended to require voter ID.

Lastly, conservatives want to amend Minnesota’s constitution, requiring that any tax increase pass both legislative bodies by a supermajority of votes. A majority is fifty percent plus one. A supermajority is either three-fifths or two-thirds, depending on who’s talking. This is a big-deal bad idea.

The constitutional framers took great pains to create a publicly responsive system of government. They embraced a checks-and-balances mechanism, rooted in representative democracy, requiring the executive and legislative branches to work together. This, our present, system is working exactly as planned. State policymakers may have compelled your skyrocketing property taxes but they haven’t raised your state income tax rates.

The supermajority creates a virtually impossible legislative action barrier. It would permanently lock Minnesota into 2012, disregarding future generations’ needs or input. An immediate outcome will be increased state borrowing costs as the bond rating agencies raise Minnesota’s risk profile and lower our state bond rating. Without doing anything else, Minnesota will have to pay more to finance our regular road infrastructure maintenance.

Conservatives want to place the supermajority question on the fall election ballot. They’re trying to implement an extreme conservative agenda by manipulating and subverting Minnesota’s democracy. Binding future generation’s hands isn’t very democratic.

Minnesota will not be well-served by these proposed conservative state constitutional amendments. They will further the process of concentrating wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands. Instead, Minnesota must invest in itself. Only strong, properly funded schools; affordable healthcare; robust transportation infrastructure; and job-creating economic growth moves Minnesota forward. These are the issues that really matter.

Minnesota’s elected officials should consider the Roman Emperor Titus’ lament. Titus had a brief, two-year reign. Suetonius, the Roman historian, wrote that Titus wasn’t the brightest, smartest or most capable emperor but he was diligent. He worked hard at exercising his responsibilities. Once, realizing that he’d done no personal favor for anyone that day, he said, “Friends, I have wasted a day.”

Minnesota legislators would be well-served by Titus’ concern. They have ample time to drop their conservative constitutional amendment plans, focus on what really matters, and not waste the session.

Minnesota 2020 Journal: Conservative Cronyism

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 12:00:40 +0000

By John Van Hecke, {related_entries id="article_author_blogger"}John Van Hecke, Executive Director & Fellow

Take note, Minnesota. The reward for expanding failed conservative public policy is more failure.

Yesterday, Minnesota’s conservative state legislative policy leaders rolled out yet another version of “Reform 2.0”. This conservative policy initiative is dysfunction disguised as small government ideology. It’s a public policy distraction designed to suggest a legitimate activity when the reverse is true. It will accelerate the concentration of public investment’s benefits into fewer, richer hands.

Reform 2.0 isn’t reform but is simply more of the same. What we have is failing Minnesota. More of the same means more failure.

I confess. I’m giving Reform 2.0 more attention than it deserves. I am, reluctantly but candidly, facilitating the conservative policy communications strategy. Confronting a fallacy requires identifying and naming it, thus perpetuating the fallacy, creating a paradox. How do I expose a lie without advancing the lie?

Right off the top, conservatives are deliberately misusing the term, reform. They’re not interested in reforming government to better serve Minnesotans. Instead, they’re traveling a well-worn path.They’ve established a policy course of action that rewards a select few while asking the great majority to pay for benefits accruing to the few. A hundred years ago, that policy was called cronyism. It’s a common form of rule, reaching back across millennia.

Minnesota’s conservative policymakers haven’t proposed anything new.

Understand that Minnesota’s conservative policymakers aren’t small government visionaries. They’re actually very comfortable with large, far-reaching government. They want to extend state government’s control, disregarding the state-local balance of power that undergirds Minnesota. Conservatives object, however, to implemented policies that differ from their own.

It’s not government; it’s government’s activity. When state policymakers ask Minnesota’s highest income earners to pay a lower effective tax rate than that paid by Minnesota’s majority middle and low-income earners, they’re implementing policy affirming the authority of Minnesota’s state government. It’s only when communities try to increase their own property taxes, compensating for conservative state policy-driven funding cuts that conservative policymakers roll out their big government objections.

Reform 2.0 isn’t reform. It’s game-playing and verbal jousting with the potential to create real, enduring harm.

Minnesota invests fewer real, per-pupil state funds in schools than we were spending ten years ago. Minnesota has dramatically and unilaterally slashed efficient state revenue sharing with cities and counties, compelling local service cuts and property tax increases. Minnesota’s road repair backlog has been growing over the past decade. Minnesota’s affordable healthcare tradition is slipping out of our hands.

None of these things happened by accident. They are choices; clear, purposeful and deliberate choices to do less for the greater Minnesota in order to do more for a select few. Conservative public policy is enriching Minnesota’s highest income earners by doing much, much less for middle and low-income families.

Reversing this trend requires an equally affirmative choice. It starts with confronting conservative policy disinformation. Reform 2.0 isn’t reform; it’s more of the same. So unless we want to continue cutting funding for Minnesota’s schools, Minnesota’s roads and bridges, Minnesota’s affordable healthcare commitment, and Minnesota’s real job growth support, we have to change direction.

We have to stop pretending that conservative policy plans like Reform 2.0 are thoughtful additions to Minnesota’s public policy discourse. Conservative communication strategists deliberately use worlds like reform to mislead the public. Obfuscation, in a democracy, is never a good thing. When facts and rhetoric don’t meet, proceed cautiously.

Minnesota does best when we invest in ourselves, working to improve schools, deliver on affordable healthcare’s promise, create robust transportation infrastructure and grow good jobs. We excel when we work together. An honest, vigorous debate about resource allocation and investment only occurs when the debate is honestly engaged.

Conservative public policy does one thing while conservative advocacy rhetoric suggests something quite different. It’s a distraction. If we focus on what really matters –jobs, schools, families, growth and prosperity- the conservative paradox disappears. We suddenly see clearly that conservative policy rewards the few at the expense of the many. Staying on this path will only deliver more of the same. Minnesota doesn’t need more failure. Minnesota needs a path forward, toward prosperity.

Minnesota 2020 Journal: Introducing the Rotundas

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 11:00:57 +0000

By John Van Hecke, {related_entries id="article_author_blogger"}John Van Hecke, Executive Director & Fellow

I give advice all the time but it’s rarely heeded. A year ago, I suggested that Minnesota’s new state public policy leaders meet regularly, outside of formal policy-making relationship settings. They should, I advocated, create a vehicle for regular, meaningful exchange but absent the button-downed trappings of a 10am meeting in the Governor’s Reception Room. Drawing on Minnesota’s Scandinavian roots, I suggested weekly or even daily saunas.

Governor Dayton, Speaker Zellers and then-Senate Majority Leader Koch never adopted my suggestion. Look where we are today.

Last year’s legislative session was ugly. Conservative policy leaders insisted on a cuts-only budget. After a three-week state government shutdown, the compromise budget was based on further program cuts, financial book jiggering, and shifting costs into future fiscal periods.

I don’t know that weekly leadership saunas would’ve produced a balanced approach, pairing strategic programs cuts with modest revenue increases, but they didn’t even bother trying my suggestion.

That’s ok. I have another, new approach for the new legislative session: a cappella singing.

The idea of policymakers finding common-cause, if not flat-out relaxation, in music is not a new idea. A few years back, Minnesota Congressman Colin Peterson played bass guitar in a bi-partisan Capitol Hill band. Mostly, they played country music covers without talking a lot of shop. Like nearly all bands, they eventually broke up. Still, simply being together, working on a groove, creates opportunity for compromise and public policy creation.

I love small ensemble singing. Quartets, octets, mixed-gender or single sex groups. They’re all good. Trio or duet singing is harder because two or three blended voices, while magical, doesn’t quite capture the range and harmonic possibilities of four or more voices. Also, close-harmony duets or trio singing requires real skill. Apart from the shattering emotional experience of losing a brother, the two surviving BeeGees stopped performing because Maurice Gibb carried the heaviest load. He sang the middle part.

Singing on the high or low end is comparatively simple. Finding the correct middle note binds the extremes. It’s a lot harder than it looks. Or sounds.

Consequently, I’m suggesting that Dayton, Zellers and newly-elected Senate Majority leader Dave Senjem include House Minority Caucus Leader Paul Thiessen and State Senate Minority Caucus Leader Tom Bakk in the group. Five voices create great sonic potential, richer than three yet no one can hide.

Consider some of the great quintets in vocal music history. The Dominoes. The Platters. The Five Blind Boys of Alabama. Sweet Honey in the Rock is a women’s quintet with the sixth, non-singing member signing in ASL. The Beach Boys weren’t sufficiently skilled to play musical instruments on their records—the Wrecking Crew performed that function—but they moved five-part harmony into the rock and roll era.

Five is the right number.

Let me also suggest a name: The Rotundas, after that big open space in the State Capitol’s center. The rotunda looks cool, giving people a place to congregate but doesn’t belong to the Governor or the Legislature.

A cappella singing eschews all instruments but voice. It requires only modest singing skill but, most importantly, rewards listening. Hearing the other voices in order to find the right note, chasing a single vocal vision—creating one voice from five—is a blast. And, all of those tiled Capitol surfaces practically scream for both doo-wop and Gregorian chant numbers.

The possibilities are endless. I mean, who doesn’t like singing? It’s a skill routinely taught in school music programs. Well, sort of. Real, per-capita state educational budget cuts and school payment funding shifts are causing music program elimination but since most state policy leaders were educated in an earlier, better-funded era, they’ll know how to sing even if their kids or grandkids are deprived of the same opportunity.

But, I digress. I’m looking for a mechanism for Dayton, Zellers, Senjem, Theissen and Bakk to work together without overtly discussing Minnesota’s considerable public policy challenges. Vocal group singing fits the bill. It doesn’t require disrobing, sweating or rolling in the snow like my sauna suggestion. Feedback is immediate. Right or wrong notes, the singers know.

The Rotundas could set a new standard for state policy making. Rather than an endless slog of work days, Tuesday rehearsal nights could be the week’s salvation, creating common ground. Singing can lead Minnesota forward, helping policy leaders focus on what really matters. I know I’d stop and listen.

Minnesota 2020 Journal: Standing Still Means Falling Behind

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 11:00:51 +0000

By John Van Hecke, {related_entries id="article_author_blogger"}John Van Hecke, Executive Director & Fellow

Minnesota doesn’t stand still. It grows or contracts. It expands or shrinks. We move forward or we fall behind.

As a public policy matter, we must ask how and why Minnesota prospers or stumbles. The answer guides policy planning and, critically, how Minnesota invests billions in our human, economic, healthcare, education and transportation infrastructure.

It seems simple enough. We pool financial resources to invest in ourselves. We build schools because a well-educated, flexible and adaptable workforce is essential to Minnesota’s successful business climate. We invest in affordable healthcare because healthy people create prosperous, stable communities. We maintain safe, efficient roads and bridges because staying connected to the nation and the world puts food on our tables.

Yet, conservative public policy seeks a lesser, poorer, unjust version of Minnesota’s shared investment and shared prosperity. Conservative policy guides Minnesota’s investments into fewer, wealthier hands. It asks middle and low income Minnesotan’s to pay more and receive less while asking the very highest income earning Minnesotans to receive more and pay less.

The first policy vision creates growth. The latter doesn’t.

The post-recession Minnesota economy won’t return to 2005 or even 1995. It’s foolish to expect otherwise. Even a job as seemingly straightforward as convenience store clerking, a low-wage, minimal-skill position, requires an increasingly sophisticated understanding of retail technology and inventory management systems. Today’s cash registers aren’t the brass behemoths of a century past. They’re not even the low-profile NCR models of 20 years ago.

Contemplating change, it’s important to understand that earlier generation American technology is still churning out whatever it churned out in 1991, just not here. There’s a reasonably good chance that a metal press that was state-of-the-art two cycles back is pulling duty in a Chinese manufacturing plant.

The American writer, Peter Hessler, spent twenty years, on and off, living in and writing about China. His third and most recent China book, Country Driving, continues his chronicle of Chinese growth and change.

Curious about China’s booming manufacturing sector, he regularly traveled China’s newly expanded super highway system, poking around the transformed countryside. He saw 20- and 30-year-old American manufacturing machinery being installed in new factories. With low enough labor costs, the equipment was entirely capable of producing bottle caps, hooks, eyelets or whatever widget its design yielded.

As American manufacturers replaced old systems with newer, better, faster and more efficient machines, they sold the old stuff. Much of it ended up in China. China has cheap, low-skilled labor. China’s low labor costs, in effect, subsidized China’s manufacturing exports. Both China and the US prospered under this arrangement, moving forward together.

Here’s the important lesson. No one in China or Minnesota is interested, for exactly the same reasons, in returning to the past. There’s no growth, no prosperity to be found in falling backwards. Twenty- and 30-year-old widget-making machines, operating at increasingly lower profit margins and eventually at a loss, can’t compete with newer machines producing a better widget at a third of the cost, in a tenth of the time, using fewer but better paid workers.

Minnesota is a competitive, successful state because we have a talented, skilled and flexible workforce. Learning quickly and adapting to rapid change are hallmarks of Minnesota workers. Maintaining that tradition and advantage requires greater school investment than Minnesota’s present commitment. Crumbling, undercapitalized schools, roads, bridges and healthcare systems, like undercapitalized businesses, slowly but surely, produce decline, not growth.

Minnesota’s state policy leaders will squarely face this question once the legislative session convenes. If policymakers focus on what really matters—education, healthcare, jobs and growth—Minnesota will move forward.

If, instead, as conservative legislative leaders propose, policymakers spend three months leaping from one distraction to another, preserving ten years of conservative public policy direction, Minnesota will fall behind. The 20- and 30-year-old manufacturing machines will still be sold to China but new ones, creating new opportunity, won’t be installed here.

Or, Minnesota can change course. Using a balanced approach to control costs, policymakers can pair strategic budget cuts with modest tax increases on Minnesota’s highest income earners, investing in schools, healthcare and jobs. Minnesota can move forward or we can fall back. We just can’t stand still.