Elsewhere in Minnesota News this morning …

STATEWIDE: Local property taxes up 3.5 percent. That’s an estimated average; the truth comes out at Truth-in-Taxation hearings starting next week. [Associated Press]

RAMSEY COUNTY: She gets put on the Coleman-Franken recount board, the unallotment lawsuit, now the dad-shirt case. Doesn’t Judge Kathleen Gearin deserve a “Stay Out of the News Free” card?” [St. Paul Pioneer Press]

STATEWIDE: Al Franken’s bill would aid homeless kids. Bill would help them stay in the same school when possible. [ECM Publishers]

OWATONNA: Texts (both kinds) prompt race tensions. White kids and Somali kids are fighting after anti-Somali writings circulate. [Star Tribune]

MOORHEAD: Native Americans in college. They’re the focus of a national conference today.  [Associated Press]

ALBERT LEA: “Pay-to-play” charges could sink junior-league puck squad. The whistleblower is a bowling alley owner in Elkhorn, Neb. [Albert Lea Tribune]

Margaret Anderson Kelliher

State House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher’s gubernatorial campaign landed another labor union endorsement today, from the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 49. The “49ers” credit Kelliher with engineering the 2008 override of Gov. Pawlenty’s veto of the transportation bill — giving life to what the union terms “the largest job-creating bill in decades.”

That override has haunted the six Republicans who helped Democrats get the bill passed Pawlenty’s veto — most recently on Monday, when news broke that state Sen. Steve Dille won’t seek re-election.

One week ago, Kelliher won the backing of the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees, who called her the “most electable candidate in the race.”

Elsewhere in Minnesota news this morning ….

HENNEPIN COUNTY: They told us it would come to this. The county’s medical center will stop seeing uninsured patients who don’t live in the county: fallout from  Gov. Pawlenty’s line-item veto of funding for indigent care. [Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal]

STATEWIDE: Cities face “horror show” from state budget cuts. Metro area city officials meet today to try to figure out how to avoid the slasher. [League of Minnesota Cities]

MOORHEAD: “Downward spiral” from underfunded schools feared. New residents drawn to new schools will simply leave.  [Minnesota Public Radio]

ST. PAUL: Gentrification coming down the track. Along the planned Central Corridor light rail line, property tax hikes can kill a neighborhood sure as bulldozers.  [Twin Cities Daily Planet]

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA: Recreation and entertainment infrastructure not core to mission. The U of M’s “intransigence” (to use one key legislator’s word) on its Central Corridor complaints threatens funding for its budget requests at the state Capitol. [Minnesota Daily]

FOLEY: Native son nabs National Book Award. T.J. Stiles, a Carleton College grad, won for his biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt. [St. Cloud Times]

Elsewhere in Minnesota news this morning …

STATEWIDE: Ask Al more. Five dollars and cab fare to New York City will get you a lunch audience with Sen. Franken. [Washington Post's In the Loop]

TWIN CITIES: Random acts of criminality on YouTube. Police are on the trail of local thugs who posted a clip showing them attacking people on bikes and on foot. [Fox 9]

PRIOR LAKE: Native Americans get ready for Copenhagen. They want a say in climate-change talks. [Associated Press]

DASSEL: Steve Dille out. The Republican state senator won’t run again; he was one of the eight GOPers who helped override Gov. Pawlenty’s veto of transportation funding in 2008. [Litchfield Independent Review; Polinaut]

PRAIRIE ISLAND: Lege has last say on nuke storage. The people’s reps at the state Capitol could reverse a regulatory OK for Xcel Energy to store more nuclear waste. [Rochester Post-Bulletin]

STATEWIDE: Or possibly universe-wide? Minnesota Public Radio’s designs on dominance in news. [Braublog]

“It’s usurping the power of the legislature… Right now he’s actually writing laws,” he said. “I don’t know where’s he getting this authority, and nobody’s really taking him on.”

“Right now any governor — whether the governor is Tom Rukavina or Tim Pawlenty — can basically sign every spending bill and then decide to unallot,” he said.

Rukavina agrees that Pawlenty’s motives in unallotment have been more about his national political ambitions than in looking after Minnesota’s future.

“I think he’s being very insincere in his claim that he loves this state and loves the people of this state,” he said. “Because what he’s doing to them isn’t, from where I come from, any sign of love.”

On Monday, the House Rules Committee voted to file a brief in support of a suit against the governor’s unallotment of some $2.7 million from the state budget.

Watch it:

See answers by DFL gubernatorial candidates R.T. Rybak and Paul Thissen to Stellmacher’s ongoing candidate series on the biggest threats to Minnesota.

Elsewhere in Minnesota news this morning …

STATE CAPITOL: House to file brief in unallotment suit. It’s a roundabout way to have their say in state’s budget after Gov. Pawlenty’s unilateral cuts. [MN Publius]

STATEWIDE: Norm Coleman is golden in guv-race poll. Smart Politics says told ya so, while candidates not named by pollster have a right to cry foul. [Politics in Minnesota; Smart Politics; Political Animal]

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA: Scholars debate ID. The clash of ideas rang out as Minnesota’s P.Z. Myers pushed evolution and Ohio’s Jerry Bergman pushed back with intelligent design. [Minnesota Daily]

ROCHESTER: MnDOT hearts PRT. The state’s Department of Transportation hosts a symposium on personal rapid transit, the podcar system that’s been known to polarize people. [Associated Press]

MOOSE LAKE: Superintendent files suit over abuse as teen. His community houses sex offenders, now he alleges abuse at the hands of one, at a Catholic church retreat. [Star Tribune]

AVON: Trailers ‘untenable.’ A manufactured home park’s travails highlights the scarcity of low rents in rural areas. [Minnesota Public Radio]

Elsewhere in Minnesota news this morning …

STATEWIDE: That’s our gal. The proportion of voters who don’t approve of U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann is greater in her own district than statewide … so she should run against U.S. Sen. Al Franken in 2014. [Smart Politics]

MINNEAPOLIS: People who voted like instant-runoff voting. Somehow pollsters found 504 of them to ask. [Minnesota Public Radio]

STATE CAPITOL: State IT pros support Gov. Pawlenty. An audit says the guy who online outdoorsmen call a “slob hunter” didn’t track his office’s computer-support expenses either. [Associated Press; Star Tribune]

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA: U2 at TCF in June. Bono will talk to Bill Cooper about debt relief. [Star Tribune; City Pages]

MAPLEWOOD: Al Franken visits City Hall. It’s safe to go to Maplewood again. On a Sunday, anyway. [John Nephew]

ST. PAUL: Heckuva job, Goldie. The feds say the Gopher State did good after I-35W fell down. [Minnesota Public Radio]

Image: fcc.gov

As the holidays approach, prices are falling on flat-screen TVs like the ones that Gov. Pawlenty had removed from the civil-commitment facility for sex offenders at Moose Lake. Which suggests a dilemma: at what price point can the state ethically buy 50-inch TVs for sex offenders?

At $1,500 each, plus mounting costs, purchasing 50-inch plasma TVs for common areas where sex-crime ex-cons are confined indefinitely was a “bonehead decision,” T-Paw said at the time.

But now, you can get the same size TVs for $1,000. That’s a 33-percent drop, considerably better than the 400 percent hike in what it costs the state to run its Sex Offender Program since 2003, Pawlenty’s first year in office.

Every man has his price. What do salespeople have to do so that T-Paw leaves with a brand-new flat-screen TV for the sex offenders at Moose Lake?

Crist was initially expected to easily win the Republican nomination. But he’s come under attack from conservative activists for supporting President Obama’s stimulus package. Earlier this week, the Club for Growth announced its support for Rubio and launched a television ad attacking Crist.

Pawlenty could be gun shy about wading into local political battles after his experience pontificating about the recent congressional contest in upstate New York. T-Paw backed conservative stalwart Doug Hoffman over the GOP-endorsed candidate, only to see the district won by a Democrat for the first time in more than a century. Pawlenty has since taken some knocks from national pundits for too blatantly pandering to the conservative base.

Florida Democrats are looking to put Pawlenty on the spot. In a press release, state party chair Karen Thurman called on him to make his allegiance in the senate contest known.

“From looking at his record of pandering to the radical right in recent months, you might think Rubio has the upper-hand, but Pawlenty may have learned his lesson from endorsing the far-right candidate in New York,” Thurman said. “Then again, Pawlenty’s pandering to the Sarah Palins and Glenn Becks of the world could be too important to his national ambitions.”

“It’s like a roach motel,” says Phil Duran, an attorney with OutFront Minnesota, who has been an advocate for individuals committed to the program. “People check in, but they never check out.”

Gov. Tim Pawlenty and his Republican allies in the Legislature have repeatedly stated that spending on health and human services programs is out of control. He returned to the theme last week in announcing a proposal for an amendment to the state constitution to cap spending. “The health and human services budget is growing at rates that are just absolutely unsustainable,” Pawlenty stated.

But while politicians rail against the purported runaway costs of welfare spending and slash health insurance for some of the state’s poorest residents, the program with the most rapidly rising cost never merits mention.

Since 2003 the budget for the Minnesota Sex Offender Program (MSOP) has increased by almost 400 percent, mushrooming from $18.5 million annually to $71.6 million in just six years. The program is a budgetary black hole, but legislators don’t seem to care.

“It’s very difficult to get people to engage on it,” says Linda Berglin, who chairs the Health and Human Services Budget Division, and has sought changes to the MSOP for years. “Nobody wants to be associated with sex offenders. Nobody wants to be responsible for something that might cause a problem later on.”

But while the MSOP is largely ignored during budgetary debates, it recently garnered headlines because of the controversial purchase of two dozen flat-screen televisions for the facility in Moose Lake where the bulk of the patients reside. After the purchase details were outlined in the Star Tribune, Pawlenty immediately ordered that the televisions be removed. The plasma screens are now to be utilized by veterans’ homes and the Minnesota National Guard.

The televisions, however, are a fiscal red herring. Even at the extravagant cost of $2,282 to purchase and install each screen, they represent a rounding error in the overall cost of the sex offender program.

MSOP population mushroomed following Sjodin murder

The reason for the skyrocketing cost of the MSOP is simple: The number of sex offenders civilly committed to the program has surged dramatically in recent years. In 2003 there were 199 men (there are no women) being held at facilities in St. Peter and Moose Lake. But in the ensuing six years the population has nearly tripled, with 547 sex offenders currently being held for an indeterminate period of time. Each person enrolled in the program costs the state $134,000 annually.

The timing of this explosion in cost and sex offender commitments is by no means coincidental. In November 2003, Dru Sjodin, a 22-year-old college student, was murdered by a sex offender named Alfonso Rodriquez, Jr., who had been released from prison earlier that year after serving 23 years for stabbing and attempting to kidnap a woman. He also had a previous conviction for rape.

In the wake of that high-profile crime, the Minnesota Department of Corrections began referring all Level III sex offenders — those deemed most likely to commit additional crimes — due to be released for consideration of commitment. In addition, Pawlenty ordered that no civilly committed sex offenders be released unless required by law or ordered to do so by the courts. Under state law, the authority to provisionally release an offender who has met all the treatment requirements rests with a three-judge panel.

The ramifications of these changes were twofold: the pool of offenders being considered for civil commitment was dramatically expanded, and the odds of patients being released from the program were greatly reduced.

“Before Rodriguez the referrals that we were getting as examiners were really very, very dangerous sex offenders,” says Paul Reitman, a forensic psychologist who has screened candidates for civil commitment for roughly two decades. “Typically they had 10, 15, 20 victims.”

In some instances, individuals who have never committed violent offenses have gotten swept up in the program. The changes implemented to the program have also increased the number of people facing civil commitment who have only committed crimes as juveniles or suffer from developmental disabilities.

“We started getting a whole different group of people,” says Reitman.

So what exactly is Minnesota getting for its $70 million-a-year sex offender program? Duran, of OutFront Minnesota, doesn’t believe the MSOP has any credible means of treating patients. He points out that in response to the flat-screen television flap, the head of the program argued that the large-screen televisions were part of the treatment program.

“Then there are millions of Minnesotans every night who receive sex offender treatment,” Duran notes. “Who knew? If that’s the quality of decision making, then you know something’s wrong.”

Duran further points out that residents of the facilities are subjected to rules that even the most diligent patient would find exasperating to follow. For instance, he says, a ban on physical contact even extends to a prohibition on shaking hands.

“Shaking hands? That is a dangerous activity?” he wonders. “Help me understand in what context that makes sense.”

The systemic problems with the program are not a new development. But Berglin notes that primary oversight rests with the Minnesota Department of Human Services and that the Legislature’s authority is somewhat limited.

Last legislative session, for instance, Berglin sought what she thought was a fairly anodyne change. She introduced a bill that would have allowed felons facing potential civil commitment to voluntarily remain in prison until they had completed a sex-offender treatment program, thus potentially decreasing the chances that they’ll be subject to indefinite detainment.

“The Department of Corrections went bonkers,” she recalls. “They just went ballistic. I could not get that bill out of the judiciary committee because of the extreme position of the Department of Corrections.”

Little political will to reform program

Even when legislation has been pushed through it’s proven ineffective in breaking the patient logjam. Two years ago Berglin sponsored legislation changing the administrative process through which civilly committed sex offenders can be released. The sign-off previously had to come from the top official at the Minnesota Department of Human Services, a political appointee. Under the new legislation, the final call on whether a patient is released after completing treatment is made by a three-judge panel. But it made no difference in whether individuals were ultimately released.

Reitman and others stress that lower-cost alternatives exist that would be just as effective in protecting the public from people who have committed heinous crimes. In states such as Wisconsin, Washington and Texas, for instance, sex offenders have routinely been released from civil commitment programs and not committed additional crimes. The key to success: intensive supervision and continued treatment. If the offenders fail to follow through on any aspects of their therapy plan, they again lose their freedom.

“The research tells us that what really keeps these guys from sexually recidivating is being under intensive supervision,” says Reitman. “In reality the treatment model is there for us to follow.”

Margretta Dwyer, a former head of the sexual therapy program at the University of Minnesota, agrees that much cheaper alternatives exist to effectively treat sex offenders. She notes that it costs the state $134,000 annually to keep an offender civilly committed. “You could hire two guards in 12 hours shifts for $50,000 per year, per person and still save money,” she says.

But Dwyer believes the will to have a meaningful discussion about how to effectively deal with sex offenders is lacking at every level of the government. “Everyone’s afraid,” she says. “Every judge is afraid to step forward. Every representative and senator is afraid to step forward.”