Efficiency vs. Bashing
Rebecca and her opponent take very different approaches to government. Rebecca puts her nose to the grindstone, focuses on excellence and efficiency, and brings people together to solve problems in government. Her opponent focuses on an "activist" agenda, grandstands in the media, and bashes government, driving people apart.
Efficiency
Rebecca is a national leader in excellence and efficiency
Rebecca lives efficiency. She and her husband live an a super-energy-efficient house they designed and built with their own hands to save money. She drives a hybrid vehicle to save money. Frugal is her middle name. She even stops at garage sales to save money.
Rebecca brings that same ethic to her work as State Auditor:
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A nationally award-winning report on how local governments can reduce energy costs, saving money.
- Cutting her own funds by $1 million and giving the money to the legislature to put toward the State budget deficit.
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Doing three times as many investigations, catching more bad guys, saving money.
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Eliminating the costly second Deputy State Auditor position occupied under Anderson by Tony Sutton at the same time he that was double dipping as the paid secretary-treasurer of the Republican party - a grossly partisan conflict of interest. This administrative cut saved taxpayers a third of a million dollars in Rebecca's first term.
- Chairing a new nonpartisan Collaborative Governance Council she helped establish to find more ways governments at all levels can collaborate and cooperate, saving money.
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Implementing online trainings and meetings to cut travel for both her staff and local officials, saving money.
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Putting more information online, improving transparency, greatly reducing phone calls and saving money.
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Improving online data entry forms for local governments, reducing errors and saving money.
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Teaching local governments about the new national auditing standards and how to reduce their audit costs, saving money.
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Heading problems off before they occur, saving money.
Bashing
If all you want to do is bash government, you can't work to make it better
Pat Anderson's partisan, activist, grandstanding approach aggravated the partisan gridlock when she was in office. Using taxpayer resources, she held frequent press conferences to bash government. This is one reason the voters rejected her in 2006 by the largest defeat of an incumbent in 112 years.
Now she wants back in government, and is pursuing an activist agenda of "reinventing the relationship between state and local government, and fixing the state budget." That's not the job of the State Auditor - it's the job of the Governor and the legislature. The State Auditor's job is to watch over the tax dollars spent by local governments.
As an activist State Auditor, Anderson bashed government and made hundreds of millions of dollars in errors in reports coming out of the Office - part of a larger pattern of activism and errors before and after her term. As stated elsewhere, it's not the mistakes, it's the mentality.
As an activist State Auditor, Anderson was the first to push for and heavily promote severe cuts to Local Government Aid as a means of solving the state's budget deficit. The cuts undermined Minnesota city and county budgets, and drove property taxes way up.
Now, if in Greater Minnesota, Anderson bemoans those same cuts, and says she will work to repair the relationship between state and local governments that she herself broke. But if she's in the Twin Cities, she says just the opposite: celebrating the LGA cuts and saying they produce "efficiency."
This November, voters will choose which is more important: excellence efficiency, or errors and activist bashing.