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Put everything on table for city budget

The New Ulm City Council appears to have some work cut out for it before it finalizes the new city budget. The council got a preliminary report Tuesday that indicates a 12.65% tax levy increase would be needed to fund the budget proposals. That would be a hike of $1,045,547 over last year’s levy of of $8,266,209. The city’s budget in 2021 totaled just over $21.7 million. How a 12.65% levy hike would translate into an individual’s property tax bill is hard to say, but to most taxpayers, bigger is definitely not better. City Manager Chris Dalton has presented a long list of ...

Haiti needs help

As our attention is drawn to the Taliban’s takeover in Afghanistan and the Delta variant’s takeover of our COVID-19 battle, we should not forget the suffering going on in Haiti. A major earthquake has shattered that already fragile country on Saturday, killing at least 1,941 as of Tuesday. Tropical Depression Grace was expected to hit on Monday, adding drenching rains and flooding to their misery. The western hemisphere’s poorest nation has an ineffective, disjointed government, and has barely recovered from the 2010 earthquake that devastated the country, killing an estimate ...

U.S. security at stake in Afghanistan

In less than a month the U.S. will mark the 20th anniversary of the disastrous September 11 attack by al-Qaida on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington D.C. We went to war in Afghanistan to drive out the terrorists based there and oust the Taliban government that harbored them. 20 years. The cost has been high: according to U.S. News & World Report, 2,448 American service members were killed in Afghanistan through April, along with 3,846 U.S. contractors; 66,000 Afghan national military and police and 47,245 Afghan civilians. We have spent $2 trillion on the ...

Afghanistan is lost before we can leave

America is pulling out of its longest war, the 20-year excursion in Afghanistan. Our enemy, the Taliban regime that we supposedly ousted in 2002 for hosting the Al Qaeda terrorist group, has not waited for us to pull our troops and civilian support people out of the country. They have mounted a comeback, taking over province after province with almost no resistance from the Afghan government forces we have been training and equipping for the past two decades. On Sunday, the Taliban was reported to have taken over the presidential palace, and President Ashraf Ghani had fled into ...

Thumbs Up/Down

COVID changes THUMBS DOWN: It is discouraging how the COVID-19 numbers are rising at a time when we had been getting used to maskless freedom and the ability to gather with friends. Just as the Brown County Fair starts and we prepare for the Minnesota State Fair and back to school days, the numbers are rising. Brown County Public Health (BCPH) announced Friday that the county’s transmission status has reached the High rating level. The CDC recommends that everyone in a high transmission area wear masks indoors in public places. BCPH also recommends vaccinations for all who have ...

It took a long time to produce it, but the U.S. Census Bureau has released demographic data and statistics that tell us a lot about what’s happening in America. Primarily, the Census data will be used to set congressional district and legislative boundaries across the country. Redistricting legislation will be argued, appealed and in many cases decided by judicial orders. That is most likely what will happen in Minnesota, where Democrats control the House and Republicans control the Senate. Minnesota was able to hang on to its eight congressional districts in this census, but they ...