Hi, country cousin here- You know, the folks that grow your food and preserve our natural and cultural resources. We're a lot like you, believing in living wages, family farms, small business, equality, and stopping global warming. 'Cept we know how to drive tractors, etc...
Now we know you city cousins don't do it on purpose and don't mean to hurt us, but some of the stuff you do makes us wonder if we're on the same side. I know, things like municipal and co-op power companies and why tiny towns persist is a mystery to you, but before you legislate us out of existance, could you listen to us a bit?
For a start, here in Minnesota we have a program called LGA, and that stands for Local Government Aid, with the state sharing some of it's largesse with less fortunate towns that don't have a lot of tax base, have a lot of older infrastructure that's expensive to maintain, etc. The republicans have been shortin' us on LGA, but now that the democrats are back in control of the legislature LGA funding is going back up to what it should be, and the formula's gettin' revised.
That's where we got a problem, the proposed formula figurin' that a town of less than 100 like mine can get by on a budget of around $400 per person. But a town of over 100 is some how expected to need more like $600 a year to keep the lights on, fresh water flowin', the streets passable, and the city park neat. OK, we can take a hint- maybe that $200 a tiny town head penalty is to motivate us to disorganize our tiny town? If that's the intent, it's not workin'... We've now about a hundred towns of a hundred souls or less here in Minnesota, up about twenty since the 2000 census. And no, the co-op doesn't charge us a third less for fuel for our city's tractor because we've less than a hundred of us here. And our tiny towns provide a lot of services that we can't afford to provide without LGA help- Like the playground in our park that kids from the townships for miles around play in, because we've the only playground for over 5 miles in any direction.
Second, and I'll cut the laundry list there, could you remember us when you mandate wind and solar power percentages. Our (we own 'em) little municipal and rural co-op power services out here were making and distributing renewable power long before it became popular- for example, a lot of our power comes from East River Co-Op and has been 30% renewable from hydro for decades. We've got wind power aplenty out here too, and it's a lot cheaper than solar, so please don't force us to buy solar when we can get more bang for the buck with wind. And please remember that some of our municipal and co-op power services are tied into long term contracts to buy dirty power from coal- we don't like it either, but we're stuck with it. forcing us to buy solar generated power can thus make us pay twice for electricity, and worse yet a big solar producer that uses public subsidies to plop down in our town will bankrupt us if we're forced to buy power for them at artificially mandated high rates. The big boys like Xcel Energy can spread those costs over multiple states and millions of users, our small town municipal power services and county sized co-ops can't. And the big boys in the power biz would just love to see our little municipal and co-op power services forced to sell out for peanuts.
We'll get to why we need safe roads and rural transit just as much as you need new billion dollars light rail lines in another discussion...