Ramstad: On election's eve, voters in Minnesota's fastest-shrinking county confront rising costs

BROWNS VALLEY, MINN. — Chad Metz farms outside this town midway up the state's western border and helped build the grain bins on his cousins' farms just across the line in South Dakota.

He manages the Browns Valley Hardware Hank, the largest store in town, which recently expanded with a farm supply business called Tough Ag. He's also an emergency medical technician, teaches Sunday School at the Catholic church, serves on the Browns Valley economic development association and is standing for re-election Tuesday to a second term on the Traverse County Board of Commissioners.

"If you're involved in one thing, you're going to be involved in 20," Metz said. "Hopefully someday my children have the opportunity that I've had, that my dad had, that everybody has had to be able to come back to this small community. You know that that's why we do what we do."

Communities of all sizes and kinds depend on do-it-all people. This part of Minnesota that Metz helps make go — long known as the continental divide between waters going to the Gulf of Mexico and those going to Canada's Hudson Bay — developed a new distinction in recent years.

Already the smallest of Minnesota's 87 counties in population, Traverse County's population fell 6% between the 2020 census and the latest update in July 2023, making it the fastest-shrinking place in the state.

Minnesota overall is experiencing the slowest population growth in its history. For more than three dozen counties, that slowdown takes the form of outright decline. Which means the people in them are at the forefront of one of capitalism's great challenges — how to stay rich without one of the three engines of economic growth.

I'm using "rich" in its broadest sense. Minnesotans may not think of themselves as rich — and incomes and net worth vary widely, of course — but as a place and people, we are some of the wealthiest on Earth. And we definitely don't want to become less so.

Yet without a turnaround, Minnesotans in counties that are shrinking in population must become more productive or develop more natural resources to maintain their wealth, let alone increase it.

Traverse County's recent decline amounted to around 215 people and left its population at just over 3,100. Two-thirds of them moved elsewhere and 91 were lost to what demographers call "natural decline," or deaths outnumbering births.

I decided to visit ahead of Tuesday's election because I wanted to see how such decline affected the county's political scene. Nationally and in Minnesota, results over the last several elections have shown that Democrats prevail in growing places and Republicans in shrinking ones.

In my most recent column, I reported on the opposite end of the growth spectrum, in Rochester where Mayo Clinic's expansion is attracting people and the big issue is building enough housing to keep up with demand.

Traverse County has several things going for it: a young group of county commissioners and school leaders, an excellent weekly newspaper, and natural resources — lakes and hunting areas — that attract visitors.

Fortunately, it also has potential to add to its tax base with wind or solar projects. They draw controversy but spin off tax revenue without the strain on services or infrastructure that, for example, a new manufacturing operation would.

In a surprise to me, Traverse County shares in the statewide need for more housing. A large dairy operation recently had to build some homes in Wheaton, the county seat, for some of its workers. Child care is also a problem as many longtime independent providers have retired, officials and residents told me.

While growing areas of Minnesota confront those challenges from a place of economic abundance, Traverse County and places like it operate in scarcity that threatens to spiral.

For Traverse County schools and government entities that receive funds based on population, the effects of population decline were compounded by the high inflation of 2022 and 2023.

On Tuesday, voters in two of the county's three school districts will face referendums on special tax levies. The districts need to cover fixed costs after state aid fell with enrollment decline.

"When you have a small district like us, where there are one or two elementary teachers per grade level, you can't make adjustments easily to reduce teachers," said Daniel Posthumus, superintendent and elementary principal of Wheaton Area Schools. Last school year, it had 383 "adjusted pupil units," a measure in the state allocation formula, down from 396 the year before and 450 a decade ago.

About 90% of Traverse County's property tax base is agricultural, and for years the Board of Commissioners strove not to raise taxes. Over the years, thrift degraded into parsimony. The current board had to boost levies significantly after inflation hit.

"They went multiple years of zero levy increase or 1%," Metz said. "We have a courthouse that's falling apart. We have a jail that is struggling. Years ago, a 1 percent or 2 percent raise would have made us so much better off right now. Unfortunately, my first two years in, we've had some of our highest levies."

His opponent Todd Johnson, who owns a resort on Lake Traverse and previously served on the board, said he would like to see the state's minimum aid to counties raised. "It's only right that states fund the impact of their policies," he said.

The other pressure on population is the county's proximity to the Dakotas, where taxes are lower and regulations on businesses looser.

State Rep. Jeff Backer, a Republican from Browns Valley who is running for a sixth term, told me this year he encountered more people as he campaigned telling him they planned to move to the Dakotas. He wants to see Minnesota scale back on business regulation and other costs on taxpayers.

"When you look at the Dakotas, that whole mentality is different than Minnesota," he said. "You've got more freedom to take risk, within boundaries. What Minnesota has done is penalize job creators."

His DFL opponent in Tuesday's election, Michael Ziomko of Fergus Falls, said he thinks the state needs to do several things to retain people, including lowering income taxes on those making less than $85,000 to help offset the increases in property taxes people are seeing. "This issue of paying more in property taxes is big," he said.