Wednesday, February 12, 2003

following up: arbitary & political distinctions between essential & non-essential services By pure chance today, I stumbled over the website of the League of Minnesota Cities. I was interested to see that they had quite a scathing response to the State Auditor's report that recommended that state government aid to Minnesota cities be severely cut. Here are some gems from the LMC's response: The state auditor is generally charged with auditing local government finances. This report goes far beyond the traditional role of the auditor and ventures into the policy arena. ... [my thoughts exactly!] The report's distinction between essential and non-essential spending is arbitrary and ignores the fact that cities across the state are facing very different circumstances. [my emphasis] The auditor's report is built on several false premises - ... Services such as airports and transit and libraries, because they are provided by counties or regional governments in some areas of the state, are not essential services anywhere. Yes, the State of Minnesota is in deficit, like many other states. It's one thing to give libraries a "fair share" of the pain that must go around. It's quite another to give libraries an extra helping of the pain because political leaders are pursuing an extremist agenda to keep taxes low for the rich and punish all the others who actually like some of the things which government can do. Minnesota may become a cultural & educational & environmental wasteland - but hey, at least we'll have low taxes and nice roads to drive our gas guzzling SUVs on! 10:32:37 PM     are libraries essential services or not? big assumptions in a footnote Yesterday I awoke to hear the news that Minnesota's State Auditor, Pat Awada, is proposing to cut state aid to local government. Apparently, the level of state aid must be too high, because too many cities are using it to fund "non-essential services" like parks and libraries. I was intrigued to view the complete version of Awada's report, to read how they devised this essential/non-essential categorization. This turned out to be difficult to find - in half of a footnote on the first page of the executive summary: The OSA grouped three current city services: general government, public safety and streets and highways together to form essential current services. All other current services are called non-essential current services for the purposes of this study. (emphasis not added) That was it. I'm not suggesting that the essential services listed aren't really essential. It is interesting to see the leaps in logic here. First, that all government services are either essential or non-essential. Second, that it is not reasonable to fund non-essential services. In my view, to say that governments are only about roads and police is the same as saying that the only things people need in life are food and water (& grudgingly, shelter, because it gets kind of nippy in Minnesota winters). Of course, people do need food, water and shelter, or they will quickly perish. But that is only the beginning of people's needs - what about the human needs for companionship, purpose etc? Once the most basic needs have been satisfied, do the secondary & tertiary needs come to the fore. In the same way, roads and police are the basic services of government, and after them come the secondary services (like parks & libraries etc) which give meaning to society. I would have mentioned education earlier, except that this report by Awada only concerns funding to cities, not school boards (they'll have their turn, I'm sure). By the way, there is no state library system in Minnesota. The local government public libraries are the only ones that we have. By lumping them into non-essential local government services, is Awada saying that there is no place for public libraries anywhere in Minnesota? The assumptions in this footnote raise some important questions. I was curious to see if it was standard practice for governments to consider libraries as "non-essential services" in this supposed information age. I was not able to find very much. Probably because these are decided by what is not said rather than by what is said - for example, Pat Awada's report makes no mention of libraries, but this doesn't reduce its potential negative effects on libraries. I found two interesting things: a newsletter from a Wisconsin library system encouraging people to let their leaders know in very concrete terms what reductions in library funding will mean. The other one is a pdf version of this paper: Proctor, Usherwood and Sobczyk, What happens when a public library service closes down?, Library Management 18, no. 1 (1997): 59 12:42:24 AM

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