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SOLID USE OF TIME AND RESOURCES
By Ryan Flynn | March 24, 2009
I thought we had a budget to solve?
“Several St. Cloud area legislators this morning are announcing legislation that calls for combining all of Stearns and Benton counties and the northern part of Sherburne County.
The bill is being written under the draft name “Lake Wobegon,” the fictional town of Minnesota radio storyteller Garrison Keillor. Any eventual reformulated county would be given a permanent name by its residents.” Source: Star Tribune, March 24, 2009.
The bill’s sponsors include Senator Tarryl Clark, DFL-St. Cloud, and Representatives Larry Haws, DFL-St. Cloud and Larry Hosch, DFL-St. Joseph
This bill is just plain weird. If we really wanted to streamline things geographically couldn’t we have just a handful of counties statewide?
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Topics: Uncategorized | 11 Comments »
March 24th, 2009 at 12:57 PM
Really? And it makes sense to have a rural hub city governed by three different counties?
How is that a solid use of time and resources?
March 24th, 2009 at 1:10 PM
You are right… Focusing on issues like gay marriage is a much better way to solve the.budget crisis.
March 24th, 2009 at 2:26 PM
PlymouthDem is apparently a homophobe. Constantly bringing it up and commenting on it. My goodness. First the liberals go after the Special Olympics, now they are attacking homosexuals.
Pylmouthdem has clearly defined the Democrat party.
Leroy, your post is very Loopy today. Don’t you think the residents of each county should decide this not the DFL? This looks very much like a DFL power grab.
March 24th, 2009 at 2:53 PM
Sound fiscal proposal if you look beyond the aweful title. St. Cloud and surrounding suburbs are in 3 different counties which causes all sorts of minor but ultimately costly problems. This kind of proposal comes up every few years due to the complexity of dealing with so many different stakeholders for even the littlest things that legitimate goverment does.
March 24th, 2009 at 3:55 PM
Do we really need 87 counties?
March 24th, 2009 at 4:33 PM
[...] SOLID USE OF TIME AND RESOURCES | [...]
March 24th, 2009 at 5:27 PM
Hiram, get real. If something like this were to happen it should be coming from the counties themselves and not the DFL’ers trying to grab all the power they can in the short time they have left.
March 24th, 2009 at 9:50 PM
Counties are created by the state legislature. If Pawlenty was serious about government reform and educational reform, he would have proposed these consolidations long ago. We have a county government structure that goes back 100+ years. We have counties with 4,000 people. Small rural county commissioners are each on a handful of joint powers boards that manage joint solid waste, multi-county jails, radio networks. Pawlenty’s idea of new ideas for governing is joint purchasing of road salt with Wisconsin.
March 25th, 2009 at 10:35 AM
As long as the DFL is waisting time on change for change’s sake, let’s do away with use of the term county.
“Garrison Keillor’s Socialist Republic” has a nice ring to it.
March 25th, 2009 at 8:37 PM
Goverment is best kept restrained at the lowest level. That is why liberals want to consolidate counties. They don’t trust the voters to run their piece of the world.
Consolidation of power is their objective and they must be stopped. Only 2 years until 2010 and conservatives can correct all the damage they have been doing to this country the past 2 years.
Under their lack of effective leadership and oversite our financial markets have tanked. They caused this to happen in order to make these power grabs.
They will be stopped.
March 29th, 2009 at 7:57 PM
Tommy sneaks in another one. Poor pityful Tommy.