On Tuesday night, the Northfield City Council passed a resolution supporting the use of general state funds for a study into the establishment of a passenger rail corridor that would connect the Twin Cities with Northfield, Faribault, Owatonna, Albert Lea, and points further south.
City Councilor Suzie Nakasian has spent more than ten years working on this project. She said this would actually be a re-establishment of the North/South spine that was once called The Twin Star Rocket, a rail line that, until 1968, ran twelve trains a day between Minnesota and Texas.
Nakasian said there would be several benefits to the Northfield Community as well as the entire southern region of the state. Economic development, she said, still follows every rail line that is established, and in fact, statistics show that every dollar spent on the establishment of a rail line come back 4-5 times in economic benefits to the community. The passenger line would run on the same tracks as the Union Pacific line that runs through Northfield, she said, and would hasten the establishment of the rail quiet zone long sought by city leadership.
There are environmental benefits to running a passenger rail line to the Twin Cities as well, she said. Approximately 50% of all county residents commute to either Hennepin or Ramsey County for work, and passenger rail could reduce carbon emissions from those daily commutes by 27%. The establishment of this rail corridor, would offer what she called “Educational Infrastructure,” as well, as it would connect all 17 private colleges in the state, along with the seven schools in the Minnesota State College system, four of the five campuses in the University of Minnesota system and several vocational and technical schools.
Finally, Nakasian said, there is an equity component to the passenger rail system. It helps people from lower incomes, and seniors who don’t care to drive the way they once did, to get around. And she said, it addresses a major discrepancy between transportation infrastructure I the Twin Cities Metro Area, and greater Minnesota, and Southern Minnesota in particular.
“But there’s equity in another sense, which is Minnesota has long suffered – and this is my personal opinion only – sort of a Metro-Centrism; that the transportation investment focuses on the seven-county Metro area. By investing in this regional rail plan, we’re pursuing a more balanced, more equitable transportation system which supports greater Minnesota, as well as the metro.”
Nakasian said the study has the support of Representative Todd Lippert and several other outstate legislators. She is hopeful it will be passed during the current legislative session.
Rich Larson’s full conversation with Northfield City Councilor Suzie Nakasian can be heard here
Hillmann discusses state’s ‘chronic underfunding’ of education
Also on Tuesday night, the Northfield School District’s budget prioritization process began in earnest. After meeting with District Director of Finance Val Mertesdorf last week, the 60-member prioritization committee broke into three groups and began to evaluate and vote on what they see as the district’s most important expenditures.
Hillmann said, because the school district will lose about 400 total students over the next 8-10 years, about $4.5 million dollars will have to be removed from the district’s $50 million budget. They are taking these steps to make the cuts early in the decline so that any changes made will be sustainable.
However, Hillmann reiterated his position that declining enrollment is not the only reason they find themselves in this situation. For more than thirty years, he said, there has been an erosion in the amount of funding the State of Minnesota has devoted to education. Like most school districts, Northfield receives 70% of its funding from the state, based on a basic formula that allocates about $6700 to the district per pupil. In each year since 1992, however, the increase in the basic formula has failed to keep up with inflation. Leaving alone the drastic inflation increase we have seen this year, Hillmann said, if the state had just kept up with the Consumer Price Index, the amount the district would receive per pupil would be closer to $8300 and this would be much less of an issue. Moreover, he said, the state has failed for years to properly fund Special Education programs, which Hillmann sees as morally imperative. The lack of Special Ed funding from the state costs the Northfield School District about $5million each year.
In 2021, the legislature increased funding to the basic formula in what was characterized then as an historic investment in education. Hillmann said, that simply was not the case.
“When you say a 2.45 % investment on the formula is an historic investment – and even then, it didn’t match inflation – I would argue that that is one perspective. And of course, we are very grateful. It was a helpful piece. We would always be thankful for it. But to frame it in a way that it solved all of the schools’ issues is not even close to right.”
The Superintendent said that he and the rest of the school district is grateful for any amount of money the state allocates to education, but the reality of the situation is cuts must be made to the budget.
He called it a messy process, and one that is not enjoyable, nor is it easy. He said the district staff, faculty, students and families will have to live with some ambiguity and uncertainty for a little while, but in the end, the community has been very generous with providing resources, and they will be able to find the best ways to achieve their goals and meet the community’s expectations.
Rich Larson is the KYMN News Director. Contact him at rich@kymnradio.net
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