Letter to the Editor: How can a state bankrupt its counties?

By Patricia Heart, Cass Lake

April 26, 2025 at 6:30 AM

Of course, overspending revenue leads to bankruptcy (as some people know from their personal finances). A state can bankrupt its counties through cutting funding and by making unfunded mandates.

That is, and specifically here in Minnesota, our state government has mandated specific actions and tasks of the counties without supplying funding for said mandates. Either taxpayers in counties pay for the state鈥檚 demands, or we don鈥檛 carry out the demands and suffer consequences, such as defunding.

For example, (several years ago) the Minnesota Department of Corrections informed Beltrami County of its jail no longer being up to code and supplied options. If the county chose not to comply, the jail would have been shut down and inmates would go to other counties at greater expense to Beltrami. The local sales tax was implemented to pay for the new jail.

The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency has told Beltrami County and others that the construction and demolition landfill site will not be permitted after 2029 when the current license runs out. Waste managers devised a solution and submitted it to the state, which will not assist in funding the construction of a compliant landfill.

Guess who gets to pay for it?

Minnesota Health and Human Services has issued many costly, unfunded mandates. One of these entails time trying to locate lost relatives of only a certain race of people without funding the extra manpower or hours the project requires.

Perhaps our 鈥渞epresentatives鈥� prefer to spend our taxes on the Northstar Rail, which has gotten less use, and their new buildings, and their raises. More state revenue goes to the Twin Cities than to rural Minnesota.

Here are two questions to accompany the title question: Where is the conscience of our state officials?

Whom could they really be serving?

Here are three clues: The voting records of most legislators are visible at where votes on issues are compared with the U.S. Constitution. Secondly, the socialist presidential candidate of 1928, and thereafter, publicly rejoiced at the strides made toward Socialism under Eisenhower and Roosevelt, 鈥減articularly in the fields of Federal spending and welfare legislation.鈥� (The Naked Capitalist, p. 130)

Third, the Cloward and Piven Strategy culminates in bankruptcy and has been the policy of a certain party since 1972.

Let鈥檚 contact our state officials, because they are supposed to serve the people, not vice versa. Let us also vote according to knowledge of candidates and the constitutions (state and federal) and wisdom.