The looming threat of a city workers’ strike in Ely, which was still pending as of the Timberjay’s Thursday deadline, is emblematic of the increasingly difficult choices facing cities and public employees as a result of the ongoing dismantling of the Minnesota Miracle.

For nearly half a century, Minnesotans largely agreed that every resident of the state, whether urban or rural, had a right to basic services such as quality schools, police protection, and decent roads, regardless of the wealth of the communities in which they lived.

That statewide compact has seriously eroded over the past ten years, the victim of conservative tax policies and the growing political power of the metro suburbs, whose residents typically helped subsidize, to some degree, the cost of providing services in less affluent communities.

The impact has been painful in communities across the state, but few have felt the effects as much as Ely, which has long been heavily dependent on local government aid (one of the foundations of the Minnesota Miracle) to fund basic city services.

With conservatives in St. Paul intent on all but eliminating local government aid, city officials in Ely are facing almost impossible choices. The city council’s decision to approve double-digit property tax increases drew fire, particularly at a time when many local businesses and homeowners were already struggling financially. The sad reality, however, is that the city will need even greater tax increases if it hopes to keep pace with the likely continued erosion of LGA in the years to come.

With such a prospect all but politically impossible, city workers find themselves victims of the conservative agenda, which these days is openly hostile to public employees.

Workers in Ely have already accepted a pay freeze for the past three years. Some city positions have been eliminated recently and more are probably on the way out.

When the city council now asks for workers to pay for a portion of their health insurance, city employees rightfully complain that the change amounts to a significant cut in pay. It is a cut in pay, yet it’s one that’s largely imposed not by the city council, but by a conservative majority in the state Legislature that is intentionally stripping cities of the means to pay for services that residents expect, and have long enjoyed.

Both sides in this current dispute are essentially right. The city is facing unprecedented financial challenges as a result of the loss of LGA and the replacement of the market value homestead credit with a market value exclusion. The city faces the choice of paying workers less, or employing fewer of them.

At the same time, city workers are right to protest the erosion in their own standard of living, which is due largely to tax giveaways to the wealthiest Minnesotans that were implemented in the early 2000s. We all need to understand that when those at the top enjoy the kind of tax breaks they’ve seen in recent years, someone has to make up for it. Increasingly, in Minnesota, it’s public workers and property taxpayers who are feeling the effects.

While the city council and city workers may appear to be on opposite sides in this current dispute over a new city employment contract, they would do well to recognize that they actually have common cause and share a common frustration with the political trends in St. Paul, as well as in Washington.

Without a reversal of these trends, the latest dispute will be but a warm-up act for the much more painful choices that the city of Ely, and communities throughout Minnesota, will face in the coming years.