Pawlenty unveils deep cuts amid Capitol splendor

Gov. Tim Pawlenty glowed on a TV camera's monitor. Photo: Chris Steller

Tim Pawlenty stood in his gilded Governor’s Reception Hall before legions of media Tuesday afternoon to announce unallotment cuts to the state budget that hit local governments, health care and higher education the hardest.

Pawlenty had promised to put seldom-used unallotment powers into play. The drama was in the anticipation of hearing exactly what he would cut — and by how much. It’s a role he has seemed to relish since the end of the legislative session. He’s positioned himself as the decider who fills the “gap remaining to be solved”: $2.7 billion.

With the claim that he was protecting funding for public safety, K-12 education (big asterisk there), military and veterans, Pawlenty dove in: $300 million cut from aid to local governments, $236 million from health and human services, $100 million from higher ed.

Speaking steadily with occasional lapses into self-satisfied scolding, he gave other details of what are essentially unilaterally-concocted reductions. Renters’ refunds will go down, refunds for political contributions will go away altogether, and (here’s the asterisk item) $1.77 billion in scheduled aid to schools will be put off.

While Pawlenty’s preamble on economic themes could be interpreted as a play to the governor’s much-ballyhooed presidential aspirations, the remainder of the hour in the packed, overheated room was devoted to issues within state borders.

Only when pressed about his final dig at the General Assistance Medical Care program — he’ll now end coverage for single, childless adults six weeks sooner than his line-item veto required — did Pawlenty’s voice rise to a level commensurate with the howls of protest heard around the state since he announced his intention to unallot.

Cuts to GAMC was a topic he’d avoided in his opening remarks, and he responded only after a reporter repeatedly asked about it.

Pawlenty said he refused to let the GAMC program’s “irresponsible” growth — “far outrunning everything else” — to “suffocate” the state’s ability to spend on higher priorities.

Another question that put him on the defensive: Is this level of unallotment by a Minnesota governor unprecedented? “It would be the largest,” Pawlenty said, adding that unallotment is “a device that’s been on the books since the 1930s.”

Pawlenty asserted that his decisions to cut weren’t final quite yet, pending a Thursday consultation with the Legislative Advisory Commission (LAC), but his language on that point was telling.

“We’re fashioning these as proposed or recommended unallotments until we get through the LAC process,” he said. (Emphasis added).

It was striking enough to prompt a question as to whether the remaining steps to implementing his unallotment cuts weren’t simply pro forma. Pawlenty promised to listen to others and even to accept more citizen suggestions via email — 3,000 such emails have already come in.

They were “useful,” he said.

Photo: MnIndy

The Republican’s antipathy for the state Legislature and its Democratic caucuses that put him in a position to unallot seemed soft-pedaled compared to his caustic words for Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak.

Local leaders like Rybak who complain about state cuts should “get their heads out of the clouds,” Pawlenty said, and recognize that budget reductions of 3.3 percent on average are “extremely reasonable” during the “worst economic crisis since World War II.”

Twice Pawlenty referenced with disgust Minneapolis’ commissioning of “$50,000 artistic drinking fountains” — a critique that lost some force when voiced in his reception hall, within walls positively dripping with decorative frou-frou that shimmers under gobs of gold paint.

Rybak, a likely entrant in the race to succeed the retiring Pawlenty, spoke to reporters in the hallway outside Pawlenty’s Capitol suite afterwards.

“Instead of throwing bombs,” Rybak said — possibly referring not only to Pawlenty’s remarks today but to their recent war of words via the media — the governor should plan for the long term, as Rybak said Minneapolis has done.

“The City of Minneapolis can weather this,” Rybak said. “If the state would adopt the [methods] of the City of Minneapolis, we’d all be in better shape.”

Rybak said his February budget anticipated the governor’s cuts so no further damage to the state’s largest city would result from today’s announcement.

Related: ‘Reckless’ and ‘unconscionable’: Reactions to T-Paw’s unallotment plan