Every year, we in West Saint Paul, Minnesota get our property tax notices in the mail. Every year, people ask the same questions in the West St. Paul Neighbors Facebook hellscape group. What the heck is going on with my property taxes? Is the city council robbing us blind? Or am I just house-wealthy and paying for it?

These questions are very reasonable! Property tax is weird.

It’s easy to understand a sales tax: I spent $100 dollars at Kohl’s Target, so I must pay an extra $7.60 to Mr. Government ($6.90 to Minnesota, $0.50 to West Saint Paul, and $0.20 to Dakota County).

It’s easy to understand an income tax: I made X dollars this year, so I must pay Y% of those dollars to Mr. Government. Figuring out X and Y takes a lot of math and reading IRS documents, which is why most people have tax preparers do it for them, but we all get the gist of an income tax.

Property taxes are harder. I don’t use a tax preparer for my income taxes, I normally do them by hand, so I’m pretty good at reading tax documents for a total layman… but even I find the property tax process weird and confusing. The city website features this earnest but devastatingly uncanny movie, but it’s not very specific. It took me years to work out this simple understanding of the process, and I’m still not certain it’s 100% correct. (If you see an error, please let me know!)

Property Tax is Actually a Bunch of Different Taxes Smushed Together

Here’s my property tax notice for 2022: https://gis.co.dakota.mn.us/content/tnt/42-01800-82-130.pdf

Don’t worry, I didn’t just post my private information online! In fact, property tax information (including the name of each property owner) is public information. You can look up the property tax info and deed owner for literally any address in West Saint Paul using Dakota County’s wonderful GIS tool, and pretty much everyone’s address is public through either TruePeopleSearch.com or TheRealYellowPages.com or (for a nominal fee) WhitePages.com. (The county auditor also has a public voter file with addresses, but I think you have to drive to get it.) This is a fun way to spend an evening if you’re as lame as me.

I looked through about a dozen property tax notices picked at random from around WSP, but mine’s pretty typical, so let’s walk through it. Dakota County officially believes I will owe a total of $3,826 in property tax next year. However, that number is actually a bunch of different taxes added together into one number. As you can see, I’m actually getting my property taxed by:

• Dakota County ($630)
• The City of West Saint Paul ($2,063)
• Minnesota Independent School District #197 (Mendota-Eagan) ($981)
• The Met Council ($58)
• “Other Special Taxing Districts” ($93), which is maddeningly vague but seems to be (based on this):
  • Metropolitan Mosquito Control District (since 1958!)
  • Metro Transit
  • South Metro EMS
  • Many Dakota County residents also pay into a watershed district, usually the Vermillion, but, as far as I can tell, no one in West Saint Paul is in a watershed.

All these different groups are taxing your property, all of them separate from each other. For simplicity, Dakota County collects all* these separate taxes in one big check—but, when your property tax suddenly goes way up, this makes it difficult to tell exactly who’s responsible. Did the schools get more expensive? The light rail line? Did South Metro EMS need a new ambulance? To figure this out, you have to go item by item.

How These Numbers Get Picked

The biggest line item by far is the tax for the City of West Saint Paul. This is also the line item that increased the most from 2021 to 2022. This is true not just for me, but for everyone whose property tax statement I looked at. West Saint Paul is the big ticket item.

So let’s take a look at how the City of West Saint Paul decided that I owe them $2063 this coming year.

The Levy Amount

Some people say that you should start figuring property tax by looking at your home value. This is wrong and backwards. The city neither knows nor cares what your property is worth when it makes the crucial decision: how much money is the city going to spend this year?

That decision was made in two city council meetings: on August 9th, 2021 (pp5-53), the city’s staff proposed a budget. On September 13th, 2021 (pp71-80), the city council voted to approve it. (Thank you to the West St. Paul Reader recaps for making this info much easier to dig up.)

The details of the West Saint Paul budget are fascinating, but that will have to be a separate blog post. The bottom line is: in 2021, the city had a budget of $45.9 million. Property taxes paid for $17.8 million of that. (The rest of the money came from other sources.)

In 2022, the city cut the budget to $39.0 million, reducing its total expenses. But West Saint Paul’s revenues are also falling, so it needs property taxes to cover more of the total. So, in 2022, West Saint Paul has decided that it needs $18.7 million in property taxes. (A 4.7% increase from last year.)

That’s the magic number: $18.7 million. The city has to raise that amount of money from the properties within the city. Ultimately, your personal city tax is based on that number.

But, first, there’s some math.

Property Valuation

In theory, the City could just say, “Okay, we need $18.7 million and we have 9,174 individual residential properties. Let’s share it evenly! Every property owner in the city must pay $2027!” This is essentially a head tax.

But this would be rejected by everyone as outrageously unfair. It would mean someone living in a tiny $170,000 house on Annapolis would be paying the exact same property tax as someone in a $486,000 mansion on Mainzer—and they’d both be paying the same tax as a landlord sitting on a property worth $22 million. The vast majority of us share an intuitive sense that this would not be fair: wealthier people should pay a greater share of the taxes. So we designed our property taxes to function as wealth taxes instead of head taxes.

Wealth taxes are tough, because wealth is hard to measure. What’s a house really worth? You can’t know until you sell it on a free and open market. This is a big problem for all sorts of wealth taxes. How do you decide how much Jeff Bezos is really worth? So much of his money is tied up in expensive art or investments in other companies or unique real estate or rocket ships—none of which has a universally agreed-upon monetary value. Indeed, this sort of problem has led other countries to abandon wealth taxes.

But America has refined the art of taxing property wealth to a near-science. Here in West Saint Paul, assessors from Dakota County drive around every year and use a bunch of rubrics to make a very educated guess at what each and every property in the area is worth. This educated guess is not final. If you think they’re wrong, you can phone them up and ask them to do a more detailed assessment; if you think they’re still wrong (and you can prove it), you can even take them to court.

Dakota County thinks my house is worth $302,400. I don’t really think my house would sell for that much, but it’s close enough, and I don’t really have the evidence to fight it, so I accepted this figure when they informed me of it last year. So $302,400 is my Estimated Market Value in the upper-right corner of my tax statement.

MN <3 Homesteaders

I live in my own home. Minnesota law likes people who live in their own home (aka “homesteaders”). In a variety of ways, Minnesota massively favors homesteaders, penalizing landlords (although landlords pass many of their extra costs on to renters, who are then screwed). On property taxes specifically, Minnesota gives two big legs up to homesteaders: the Homestead Exclusion and the Homestead Refund. The Homestead Refund (Form M1PR) is a (large) tax rebate you get for being a low- or middle-class homesteader; look it up next time you do your taxes, but I won’t go into it here.

The Homestead Exclusion is just a straight-up property tax deduction. It takes your Estimated Market Value and cuts it down. The smaller your house, the bigger the deduction, because the government does not want to drive poor people out of their houses. (Also, homeowners vote!) If you have a house worth $191,000, your Homestead Exclusion for 2022 is $20,050, so Dakota County has to tax you as if your house is only worth $170,950. My house is worth $302,400, so my exclusion is only ~$10,000, and Dakota County taxes me as if my house were worth $292,400. (The exact formula is set by state law.) Once your home is worth more than $413,800, the Homestead Exclusion phases out completely—the state assumes that if you live in a house that big, you can afford to pay full property taxes on it.

The bottom line is, in the eyes of Dakota County, my house is worth $292,376. That’s my Taxable Market Value.

City Staff Does Some Algebra

After doing all this hard work for every single property in Dakota County, the County informs West Saint Paul of the taxable value of each and every one of them.

Add it all up and you get a number, the total amount of property value in West Saint Paul. Let’s call it $2.65 billion. (It’s not $2.65 billion, because I’ve completely ignored a ton of property types, like commercial and apartment properties, which are taxed at higher rates… but $2.65 billion is a useful example number.)

So the city has $2.65 billion of property laying around, and needs to raise $18.7 million. What tax rate do they need to impose in order to get that $18.7 million? Easy! That’s seventh-grade math:

                total property value * tax rate = desired revenue

Or:

                $2,650,000,000 * [tax rate] = $18,700,000

Or:

                [tax rate] = $18,700,000 / $2,650,000,000

                = 0.7057%

(Again, this gets more complicated when you include the other property classes, which are taxed more than homesteads, but the basic algebra is the same, and that tax rate is correct.)

The residential homestead property tax rate for West Saint Paul for 2022 is 0.7057%. That’s how much the city has to tax each household in order to get the money it needs for next year. The tax rate is flat, so the wealthy pay more and the poor pay less, but it takes an equal slice of everyone’s wealth. (At least, assuming all wealthy people live in big houses and all poor people live in small ones.) Officially, this tax is neither progressive (which would mean hitting rich people harder, like the income tax) nor regressive (which would mean hitting poor people harder, like the sales tax).

My house’s taxable value is $292,376. 

$292376 x 0.7057% = $2063

…and, sure enough, $2063 is exactly how much I owe the city in this year’s taxes. That’s my bit of the $18.7 million.

Don’t Be Fooled

Sometimes, people who want to make some kind of political point about property taxes (pro or con) will try and argue that taxes really went down (in some clever nine-dimensional chess sense) when actually they went up (or vice versa).

For example, as we’ve seen, the West Saint Paul tax levy in 2022 grew 4.7%, from $17.7 million to $18.7 million. So, collectively, our taxes went up 4.7%.

However, the tax rate in 2022 only grew from 0.6966% to 0.7057%. That’s only a 1.3% increase. Some people try to argue that this means your taxes only went up by 1.3%. That’s not accurate. In reality, the city asked for quite a bit more money, but we had more “money” to give them already, so they didn’t need to raise the rates by as much to get what they wanted. (I put “money” in scare quotes because, of course, we don’t actually have the money our houses theoretically “created” this year. We don’t see a dime of that cash unless we sell our houses, and I, for one, intend to die in this house some time in the 2070’s, by which time I expect my house to be worth much less due to age and national population decline.)

Others will argue that your taxes didn’t really go up because the city demanded more money; they went up because your home gained value. Again, that’s not generally accurate. Your home’s value only determines your share of the taxes, not the amount. The levy size determines the amount. There are rare cases where a home’s value goes way up (or down) in value, much more than other houses in the neighborhood. If your home value does something crazy during the year, you may end up paying a bigger (or smaller) share of the $18.7 million than you did in the past, because the city now thinks you are significantly richer (or poorer) than you used to be. For most of us, though, with relatively average home value increases, we’re paying (more or less) the same share of the tax as before, but our taxes went up because the tax is just plain bigger.

(EDIT 17 November: Basically, if your city tax increase is exactly 4.7%, then that’s entirely because of the levy and not at all because of changes in your home’s value. If your city tax increase is 5.1% or 4.3%, you’re still very close, and the overwhelming majority of that increase is due to the city levy increase. The further away your city tax increase is from 4.7%, the more your home value appreciation is responsible. If your city taxes went up 9.8% this year, half of that is the city tax and half of it is because your home value went up considerably faster than the city average.)

So don’t be fooled: if you want to know whether the city raised or lowered taxes, the number you should be looking at is the size of the levy itself ($18.7 million), not the residential tax rate, not the value of your home, not the total value of all homes in the area.

(If you want to be really accurate and fancy about whether taxes are going up, the number you should truly look at is the size of the levy per resident. But our city’s population changes quite slowly, and census numbers usually lag by a couple years. Still, this can make a big difference! Using 2020 census numbers for both 2021 and 2022, I find a levy-per-resident of $864 in 2021 and $905 in 2022…  which works out to a 4.7% increase, exactly the same as if you look at the actual levy increase. But if we assume that our population went up by 100 residents in 2022, the new levy-per-resident is only $900, an increase of only 4.2%. It’d be cool if the city figured out a way to identify and publish this number.)

I should note that the West Saint Paul city government, to its credit, does not make these arguments. Some people in the city have done so (I won’t point fingers), but the city itself always prominently publishes the levy number and its percentage increase; the city never tries to hide the ball by talking about absolute rates instead. Moreover, West Saint Paul’s 4.7% levy increase for 2022 is actually the smallest levy increase since 2014. (See p64 of this document, ignoring the 2022 projection, which turned out to be a little off.) Our taxes are still going up significantly, but less than they have in recent years.

On the other hand, the city expects the 2023 levy to go up by 5.62%, which is closer to the ten-year average increase—and the size of the levy has clearly outstripped inflation, sometimes drastically, on average. (Inflation was well under 2% for nearly the entire 2010s; our property tax levy increases were held to that only once, barely, in 2012, under Mayor John Zanmiller.)

This Is Pretty Much How They All Work

Each of the government units listed on your property tax form goes through basically this exact same process. First, the County/School District/Council decides how much money they need next year. Then, they each add up the total amount of property value in their designated area. Then, they set a tax rate that ensures they get the money they’ve decided on. They apply that rate to the Taxable Market Value of your property, multiply, and, boom, that’s what you owe that government unit for the year.

Of course, every government unit on the list covers a different geographic area, so they all have different property values to work with. The Metropolitan Mosquito Control District covers the entire seven-county metro area, with millions of taxpaying residents, so they need only a very small amount of money per property to make their (already relatively small) budget work. On the other hand, Dakota County has a lot of property… but a lot of it is rural, so the average value of that property is relatively low compared to, say, ISD 197. This variation means every levy has to be calculated separately, with different property rates for each one.

A Couple of ISD 197-Specific Notes

ISD 197 has several different property tax levies, some of which are voter-approved and others which aren’t. These are all broken out into two line items on our property tax statements: “voter approved levies,” which we voted on at some point, and “other local levies,” which is just code for, “This is what ISD 197 is taxing you without your direct say-so.” I have not been able to locate a web page or report where ISD 197 transparently breaks down what each of these levies is, what each one costs, where they come from, and when they expire… but my Internet has been wonky tonight, so it could very well be out there and I just can’t find it.

First, I want to commend ISD 197 for a useful thing it does: while it doesn’t tell us the size of the levies per resident, it tells us the size of its levies per student (and does the same for individual levies). This is arguably the most useful way of tracking at a glance whether the district is increasing its spending because of increasing needs or if it’s just getting bloated.

Interestingly, the district collected $1,073 per pupil in 2021, but, if this West St. Paul Reader report is accurate about the total district budget, then the district spent $14,965 per pupil in 2021. This really shows that all the sturm und drang about the $224-per-pupil levy referendum was pretty small potatoes in the grand scheme of things; the vast majority of ISD 197’s budget does not come from property tax. (Most of it is from state income tax.)

Second, speaking of that $224-per-pupil levy we all voted on last November… it passed! This does not technically raise our taxes, because this was merely a renewal of a levy that was already in place (albeit at a slightly higher level, because the levy is adjusted annually for inflation).

However, when Dakota County put together these tax proposal sheets, it did not know whether the levy was going to pass or not. So they followed current law and assumed that the levy would fail. Therefore, our ISD 197 line item on this tax statement doesn’t include the levy. Now that the levy has been approved, the actual tax bills we receive next year will be adjusted to account for the continuation of the levy.

Bottom line: the average ISD 197 resident’s actual ISD 197 tax will be about $52 higher than what it says on this form. Mine will be $49 higher. You can compute your share here (enter your home’s Taxable Market Value into the box). So instead of paying $588.70 like my tax statement says, I actually expect to pay $637.70 in the coming year. (Probably slightly higher, but I’m too lazy to figure out the inflation component tonight.)

Property Taxation is a Terrible System

As far as I can tell, Dakota County in general (and each government within it) does a really good job administering the property tax system. Every county in Minnesota has a property tax, and every state in the Union has at least one jurisdiction that charges a property tax, too. As these things go, I have no complaints about how Dakota County, specifically, does it. In fact, I’ve had two interactions with Dakota County assessors since I moved here, and both of those interactions were excellent.

But it’s a pretty rotten system, when you get to thinking about it:

Property tax administration requires a vast national army of assessors to guess at the value of each and every property in the land. They do their best, but their guesses may or may not be accurate. Home value isn’t like income, where we know how valuable the income was because the number is literally printed on the paycheck. Instead, to tax home value, we have to employ essentially a separate detective force just to find out what exactly we’re taxing. This is expensive and inefficient. Politicians in Washington frequently remind us of the vast logistical difficulties and guesswork involved in wealth taxes… so why don’t we apply that same logic to the one wealth tax that just about every American, from the richest to the poorest, has to pay? (If you’re a renter, sorry, you’re paying property tax, too: your landlord just adds it to your rent. You get the tax without the homesteader benefits.)

The complexity of this system makes it non-transparent. That makes it difficult for voters to hold their elected officials accountable. Instead of being taxed a percentage of a concrete number you know really well and have a lot of control over (like your salary, or total household income), you are instead taxed based on a funny little number that jumps up or down based on impersonal market forces you neither control nor fully understand. Because of this wild movement, your absolute tax rates jump up or down, too—often without a clear or close relationship to the overall size of the levy! Many voters end up not understanding who they are paying taxes to, how much the taxes are, whether they’re going up or down for everyone or just them, or how any of it gets decided. Others have to read (or write) 4,500-word blog posts to get a handle on it.

We end up speaking in broad generics, like, “Hoo boy, West St. Paul taxes are getting pretty high, aren’t they? But at least we don’t live in Regular Saint Paul! They’d tax you double what we pay!” But this completely misses the fact that, actually, West Saint Paul city taxes are nearly twice as high as Saint Paul’s tax ($905/resident in WSP vs. $566/resident in SP). It’s just that our county taxes here in Dakota County are so low (less than half of Ramsey County’s) that it somewhat cancels out (and hides) how much West Saint Paul is actually charging us. This confusion, in my opinion, is largely due to the property tax system’s confusing structure. Despite everything Dakota County and West Saint Paul do to make that structure transparent to us, it’s just very hard to keep straight.

The property tax structure is not just confusing and obscure; it’s fundamentally dangerous. Taxes are generally taken from transactions: when you spend money or make money, you pay the taxman a small portion of it. You can factor those taxes into your planning before you spend or earn. When you buy a candy bar, you know to mentally add 7% or so to the sticker price. If you win the Powerball Jackpot, you know you’re only going to get about half the sticker price after the government gets its cut. And we have a whole bunch of safeguards in the rest of our tax system to ensure that, if you earn extra money, your taxes go up a little, but not more than the extra amount you actually earned. That way, you know you always have the money to actually pay the taxes.

But when you buy a house, how much are you going to owe in property taxes over the life of the property? Answer: who the hell knows? Literally no one. Might go up, might go down, might go way up. This isn’t just bad for financial planning; it can put the most marginalized members of our society on a knife’s edge.

Suppose you earn minimum wage, and you’ve spent your whole life scraping together a little nest egg to buy a small $50,000 house to call your own. You pay $210 in property taxes per year, and can just barely scrape that plus home maintenance costs together. And you are happy. But then there’s a housing frenzy in your area. It’s the Hot New Place To Live. HGTV comes to town and starts flipping houses left and right. Over the course of three years, your houses rises in value to $120,000, just because everyone wants to live in your cool neighborhood now. Now your property taxes are (this is true) $654/year. You can’t afford that!

You live on minimum wage. That wage hasn’t gone up. You don’t have any extra money coming in. You haven’t done anything to the house. It certainly hasn’t printed you extra money. Yet your taxes have more than tripled.

You can’t get blood from a stone, so you have no choice but to sell your house and move. But where? The whole neighborhood has gone up in price. You can’t stay here. You’ll have to find another neighborhood to live in. But how can you get to your job from a whole different neighborhood? Now you’re either paying for transit in both money and time, or you’re looking for a new job. You had a social support network in your neighborhood, but everyone else you know just crashed into the same problem, and they’re being scattered to the four winds.

And that’s how property taxes displace impoverished and minority communities, in a process we all know as “gentrification.” We spend all this time as a culture worrying about the community-shattering effects of gentrification (and how it reinforces racial segregation between neighborhoods), but never seem to notice that our state and local governments have direct and absolute control over one of the primary mechanisms driving it. (Between property tax and zoning codes ugh, it seems to be cities, more than any other entity, that drive ongoing segregation.)

Gentrification is even worse on renters. At least homeowners, when they are forced to sell, do generally get some of the benefit of home value appreciation, and they get to choose when and how they sell. When landlords sell, they pocket the profits and evict the residents, often with little warning.

In fact, the whole structure of property taxes is a bum deal for renters. Remember when we said that the property tax is officially flat? In reality, it’s not: it’s regressive. Renters (who are disproportionately poorer) inevitably end up paying the landlord’s property taxes (who else would?) and eat a large share of any property tax increase (although the exact tax incidence is hotly debated among economists). So renters are paying property tax, but indirectly, without the ability to challenge the valuation of their homes, without enjoying the benefits of the Homestead Exclusion, with far far smaller Homestead Refunds (seriously, the difference is stark)… and, usually, apartments are charged property tax at a higher rate than single-family homes to begin with.

Tax us when we sell our houses, heck tax the dickens out of it—that’s income!—but don’t tax us just for living in one. Housing is a basic necessity of life, and the only thing most of us do in a given year to earn this inefficient, regressive tax is keep breathing.

The state of Minnesota already has a state income tax… which means we already know the incomes of everyone in the state. Income taxes are easy to design as progressive taxes (our state’s is particularly progressive), everyone basically understands them, and people will always be able to afford them. Many other states already have local income taxes. I believe we should abandon property tax and fund our towns, schools, and mosquito control agencies through local income-tax-based levies instead.

Of course, it’ll never happen. The system is too big, too interconnected, too universal, and too complicated to transition to a new tax collection method, especially in an era of polarization, bureaucracy, and impotence. There are probably difficulties with local income tax that I haven’t foreseen. (Tell me about ’em in the comments!) But I couldn’t write a whole blog post about property taxes without at least mentioning the deep structural problems with it.

I hope this post leaves you with a better understanding of your West Saint Paul property tax statement!

UPDATE 19 November: The West St. Paul Reader just tackled property taxes as well, and (wisely) spoke to the lady in charge!

Interestingly, the city acknowledged an error in its numbers. The budget reported a levy increase of 4.74%, a figure I used throughout this article. The actual figure appears to be 5.15%. I am not updating the article body, because I think inline updates would be more confusing than clarifying, but it’s worth noting anyway that all my “4.7%” figures should be “5.2%” instead. I have not (yet) double-checked the city’s other reported finance figures.

I first started following politics during Election 2000. I was 11. Even though I already believed that America was doing some terrible things, I believed in the goodness of our people and the strength of our system to eventually, falteringly, do the right thing. I loved learning that system, with its ancient checks and balances, its ins and outs, its occasional failures and the costly sacrifices that mended them. I listened to speeches, watched debates, eventually started reading judicial opinions. I wore buttons, volunteered for “my” party, did the occasional march for human rights, and, for the most part, I thought we were a nation of decent people. Even the people on the other side, even the people doing the horrible things, I thought, were by-and-large doing their best.

I’m not sure I believe any of that anymore.

I’m not hopeful about the country. I still love the Republic, but I have written about my real fear that its days are numbered; the rot is already deep. As for the parties, not only have I lost my faith that the “other side” is mostly made of decent people, I’ve lost my faith that my own “side” is mostly made of decent people. Voting is a desultory experience. I hold my nose to vote for most candidates, when I can stomach it–and, more and more often, I can’t.

But, for the first time in many years, I am actually excited to vote for a candidate this fall. The race is the mayorship of my adopted home, West Saint Paul (a real independent city, which is of course south of Regular Saint Paul!), the candidates are incumbent Dave Napier (site) and challenger Kimetha “KaeJae” Johnson (site), and at stake is nothing less than control of the greatest municipal snow-plowing system south of the 49th Parallel!

I did not vote for Dave Napier in 2018. In fact, I compared Napier to a Dark Lord of the Sith and endorsed his opponent. Although I supported much of Napier’s vision for the city, I feared he would seek to impose that vision on the city, rather than persuading citizens to see things his way.

I am pleased to report that I could not have been more mistaken. Since 2018, I have picked up the healthy habit of following City Council meetings (whether watching them on TownSquare.tv or just reading the packets myself). What I’ve seen from my mayor has made me very happy.

As mayor, Napier has been guided by the simple, difficult virtues of good government. He reads the giant information packets that the City Council receives about every issue that comes before it, and he encourages the Council to do likewise. He strives to first understand, then follow, the law, and encourages the City Council to do likewise. He works hard to maintain good relationships with city staff, so that he gets the best information from them and they get the best guidance from the City Council–whom he encourages to do likewise. In all these ways, Mayor Napier always leads, and the Council usually follows. (Usually.)

Above all, Mayor Napier strove throughout his first term to listen fairly to everyone who came before the city government with a concern. His City Council chambers have been open forums, always inclined toward letting everyone have their say instead of racing to a decision. This is true when the subject being debated is dry-as-dust stuff, like revising the permitting process for food truck owners. But it remains true even when the subject is top-tier culture-war stuff, like whether poor residents should have improved access to abortion alternatives.

When citizens come to the podium to to praise the city for this or that, Napier nods and thanks them all for their input. When citizens come to the podium to excoriate the city, the Council, and each of its members in punishing detail — something I had occasion to do a couple months ago — Napier nods and thanks them all for their input, in the exact same friendly tone. I’m impressed with this, because I know I couldn’t do it.

I was wrong to doubt him two years ago: Mayor Napier really does want the city to come together before it acts, and he ensures the decision-making process is fair and open. Of course, eventually, the city must act. Up-or-down votes happen, and the Council imposes its will. Under the City Charter, however, Mayor Napier votes only to break ties, which allows him to act in the neutral facilitator role at which he excels–and it is often Napier who calls for extra consideration of an issue where all sides haven’t been heard before the vote.

Where he has committed to positions, I’ve found the Mayor’s vision for the city to be prudently forward-thinking. The Robert Street Project is in the past now–ratified one final time by voters in 2018–and, since then, I have seen Napier help the city strike a healthy balance between frugality and progress. For example, the city needs more housing (due to the Twin Cities housing crunch) and needs to rejuvenate blighted areas like the old golf course or the dead K-Mart (to attract and retain businesses and residents). To that end, Napier has guided several major apartment projects across the finish line, despite difficult questions of prevailing wages, tax-increment financing, and more. At the same time, Napier recognizes that, with these projects underway, it’s now time to slow down and re-strike the balance.

I hope to see a sidewalk on Bidwell between Thompson and Butler this term, and I know the Mayor does, too. However, when I caught him at Amore Coffee in 2019 and asked him for a sidewalk, the Mayor told me he’d get the ball rolling immediately–if I could persuade other Bidwell residents to sign a petition supporting a sidewalk. That’s the kind of self-restraint I like to see in local government, even when it means I have to wait longer for the obviously right thing to happen. (FELLOW BIDWELLIANS: c’mon, we’ve got a busy school, a sports field, and a pool! What’s even the argument against a sidewalk at this point, when the new assessment policy means we won’t have to pay for it?)

Truth to tell, though, I still have no clear idea whether the Mayor agrees with me on the issues I care most about in this city. His website lists no partisan endorsements or interest group commitments: a rare thing in this hyperpolarized, hyperpartisan age. Nor do I feel I need to know his mind on everything, even though I strongly suspect he is not a member of my political “tribe.” I trust Mayor Napier to give me the time of day and a fair hearing before the Council regardless of how he personally feels. Indeed, I trust him a good deal more than I trust most members of the actual Council.

Mayor Napier has earned my vote. More than that, he’s restored a little bit of my faith. Not in the Republic as a whole, but in the power of decency and hard work in good government. Perhaps someday he and I will diverge so sharply on some important policy issue that I will have to rethink my support, but I expect I will always respect him.

In the hellscape that is 2020 politics, please let me have this. If my fears for the future are someday realized, Mayor Napier is the steady hand that I’d like at the helm fighting to keep my little town–and all its residents, not just a partisan clique–above water. If, instead, things in America start to turn around, then Mayor Napier is the listening leader I want guiding us (gently, armed with nothing but good ideas, good data, and good relationships) into a better tomorrow.

Please join me in helping re-elect Dave Napier as Mayor of West Saint Paul.

UPDATE 11 October: For more information about the West Saint Paul mayoral race, visit the candidates’ websites (linked above), and also see here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Fellow residents of West Saint Paul:

Tomorrow, we vote. I have done a little research on the races in our city, and I have some gentle recommendations.

Table of Contents

A. Introduction: Robert Street

B. Mayor: Fernandez vs. Napier

C. Ward 2: Justen vs. Probst

D. Ward 3: Berry vs. Meisinger

E. Ballot Question: Sales Tax

Introduction: All Roads Lead To Robert Street

I think it’s time we admit that the Robert Street renovation was a serious mistake, and vote accordingly.

Robert Street was in bad shape. I can’t deny that. I’ve been driving Robert since 2006, when I started taking my high-school girlfriend (who lived just off Smith) out to such fine establishments as the West Side Lanes, Party City, and Sketchy Perkins.* Robert Street was easily the worst part of our dates.

*That is, Perkins on Robert, but after midnight.

Sure, there were advantages to the Robert Street of the old days: you could order a meal at Pollo Campero and then careen out of their parking lot across five lanes of traffic to arrive at Granny Doughnuts, as God intended.

But there were also disadvantages: you could be driving along minding your own business when some psychopath careens out of the Pollo Campero parking lot across five gorram lanes of traffic just to get some Granny Doughnuts! It’s enough to drive a man to Booze Mart—or even Booze Mart II! (Or, more likely still, to Cherokee Service or Zak’s Auto.)

Most importantly, Robert was in very bad repair. I’ve heard that ambulances refused to drive on it after it got real bad. In certain places, driving Robert was almost as bad as driving on… well… literally any street in Regular Saint Paul, in March, right after the snow melts. Robert Street did really need some help. We were fortunate, in 2010, to secure $8 million in federal grant money for a renovation and resurfacing.

But then we went kinda nuts with it.

Our $8 million of federal money went toward a project that was expected to cost $10 million.

Then $20 million.

Then $30 million.

Then $40 million.

Then, finally, we ended up spending closer to $50 million. (My wife: “gasp! For that kinda money, we probably coulda built a whole second sports bubble!”)

This massive cost overrun was spurred by a city council that refused to cut nice-to-have features from the project even as the costs of the essentials kept spiraling upwards.

But fine. It’s okay to spend money if you have it, especially to get cool stuff like… new traffic lights. (Okay, I guess.) But, the point is, we did not have money. Not that much money. Now we’re deeply in hock:

The debt “makes it more difficult for the city to complete major maintenance on the rest of the streets within the community,” [City Manager Ryan] Schroeder said. “The council has looked for ways to recover from that.”

West St. Paul will ask voters to approve a half-cent sales tax in November to pay for future street projects, a move the City Council said is necessary because of the steep cost of having to rebuild Robert Street. (SOURCE)

This despite the fact that we’ve seen double-digit property tax increases in the past few years already, largely to help pay for the Robert Street rebuild!

[EDIT: In the comments, I was corrected on this; the overall size of the property tax levy increased 10% in 2018 and maybe-but-probably-not in 2019 but was under 10% in 2016 and 2017. Moreover, my interest piqued, I dug into the numbers, and I found that most of the increase in the property tax levy — in some cases, all of it — came from increases in property values rather than tax rates. For example, in 2018, a year where the overall levy size increased 10%, the actual tax rate for the median home fell from 0.63% of the home’s total assessed value to 0.61% of the home’s total assessed value, even as the overall levy grew… while the same home’s assessed value jumped just about 10%. So this is a much more complicated question than I first gave it credit for.]

The people on the city council who got us into this debt are now begging the State to give us more money to pay for our profligacy. That’s been going on for years, it’s going nowhere, and the state gave us $15 million for this project off the bat, so I’m not sure where we get off demanding more. Yeah, it’s a state highway, but they didn’t ask us to spend $50 million on it.

Nor did we need to! Regular Saint Paul is resurfacing their end of Robert Street starting in 2022, but they’re keeping it simple. Know what they’re budgeting? $11 million. How is their messed-up city government managing to be four times more fiscally responsible than ours? As ex-Mayor Dave Meisinger said way back before we got to this point, “I was against a Cadillac plan. I told everybody the Chevy would get us by.” Meisinger vetoed the project plan passed by the city council in 2014. But they overrode him, and the plan went ahead. Now we have a median (okay, I guess), but we don’t have the money to keep our other streets in good repair. (But we’re still hellbent for leather to get state money to finish the bike lane beneath Robert! Priorities!)

As someone who grew up in Regular Saint Paul, this terrifies me.

One night, early on in my first winter as an official resident of West Saint Paul, I fell asleep on the couch. In the middle of the night, I was startled awake by a window-shaking rumbling outside. What was going on? Tanks! my addled just-woke-up-brain said. There are tanks coming down Emerson! The Russians are invading! It’s Red Dawn! Why didn’t I ever buy a gun?! As I cautiously snuck up to the window, prepared to dodge sniper fire, I realized the truth: it was actually just an incredibly enormous, incredibly effective snow plow, shoving the first serious snowfall of the year off to the side.

In the morning, I told this story to my wife, a lifelong West St. Pauler (yes, the same girl I took to Party City on dates). She said, “No, we just have ordinary snow plows here.”

I replied, “What, you think my 3 AM brain exaggerated how big the plow was?”

She shook her head. “Nah, you’re from Regular Saint Paul. You’ve probably just never seen one before.”

She’s not wrong. Driving in West Saint Paul in the depths of February is a positive joy compared to what I had to put up with in Regular Saint Paul. Last winter, when we got the blizzard(s) that dumped a few feet of snow on us in a couple of days? The first major wave of snow came down, as I recall, on Thursday afternoon. My street in West Saint Paul was plowed beautifully late Thursday night, then again each subsequent night. My parents, in Saint Paul? Their street was never plowed. When we went to visit, my van got stuck in the snow on their Regular Saint Paul street for a full hour… two days after the snowfall ended. (Four days after it started!)

That’s typical Saint Paul governance: they tax property far higher than we do, they provide half the service (if that), the roads are undriveable for all of winter (no plowing) and most of spring (car-ruining potholes), they spend all their money on redundant bike lanes, and they don’t have to care because Saint Paul voters elect the candidates from the same party in every single election regardless. I honestly didn’t realize how bad I had it in Regular Saint Paul until I discovered how much better it is here in West Saint Paul.

And the excellence we enjoy in West Saint Paul depends on our road maintenance money not being (I’m sorry, guys) squandered by city officials who have eyes bigger than their pocketbooks. It would be far too easy to turn into Saint Paul. If we let ourselves continue to drift toward the tax-and-spend fiscal irresponsibility we saw over the course of the Robert Street project, that’s exactly where we’ll end up.

Yes, we did have to do something about Robert Street. It was a big problem. But it’s a street, not a tourist attraction. The thing we needed to do was fill in the potholes so folks could drive on it safely. We went way beyond that, with a full reconstruction and overall prettification… and we couldn’t afford it. It was a grave error that jeopardizes the future of our city. At the very least, according to the city, it leaves our finances in an iron lung for the next fifteen years.

In other words, by the time Robert Street is paid off, my unborn daughter will be starting to look at colleges.

The people responsible for this error should be thanked for their dedicated public service, civic spiritedness, and general good intentions. But, in my opinion, they should not be invited back for another term in office. Nor should their bad choices be rewarded at the ballot box.

Mayoral Race: Anthony Fernandez vs. Dave Napier

Given everything I’ve said above, this race is straightforward.

Dave Napier was a city council member who supported the Robert Street project, and he stands by it to this day.

Anthony Fernandez was not on the council at the time, but has repeatedly voiced skepticism and criticism.

I plan to vote for Anthony Fernandez, and I politely recommend you do the same.

I did watch the entire mayoral forum a couple of weeks ago, which was fun. Regular readers know that this means I’m going to give some unflattering impressions of the candidates, as I often do. This time, my impressions mostly reinforced the way I was already leaning:

Mr. Napier kept talking about how we need to elect him so he can “provide quality leadership to this city so that we can unite as a community and as a council to accomplish the goals that we want.” This “uniting” us and “getting everyone on the same page” so we can “move forward” was a constant theme of his.

I kept flashing back to that scene in Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones, where Anakin jokingly-but-not-jokingly comes out to Padme as having… not so great politics:

ANAKIN: I don’t think the system works.

PADME: How would you have it work?

ANAKIN: We need a system where the politicians sit down and discuss the problems, agree what’s in the best interests of all the people, and then do it.

PADME: That is exactly what we do. The trouble is that people don’t always agree.

ANAKIN: Then they should be made to.

PADME: By whom? Who’s going to make them?

ANAKIN: I don’t know. Someone.

PADME: You?

ANAKIN: Of course not me!

PADME: But someone.

ANAKIN: Someone wise.

PADME: That sounds an awful lot like a dictatorship to me.

ANAKIN: Well, if it works.

Now, to be clear, I do not think that Dave Napier is a Dark Lord of the Sith! He’s worked at the Dodge Nature Center since before I was born. That’s about the least Sithy job there is. I’ve no doubt he’s a good man who has worked hard to do what’s best for our city, and I think some of his ideas are great.

But I find there is a strain of thinking in politics, particularly a certain style of the new-urban progressivism Mr. Napier embraces, that sees the government’s job as mainly “getting everybody on the same page” with new-urban progressivism. And if some bloc of voters just doesn’t see why we should build a sidewalk we can’t afford? Well—they should be made to see, because a United City must Keep Moving Forward under Wise Leadership.

Figuring out what the city actually wants, developing true consensus? This isn’t on the table, because our Wise Leaders know they are looking out for our Best Interests, regardless of what some of us might actually say. That ain’t great… and it leads us straight into boondoggles like the Robert Street rebuild, which went from $10 million to almost $50 million because city council reps, including Mr. Napier, refused to change course or cut scope even as Mayor Zanmiller lost his office over it and the new mayor tried to veto it.

I do quite like a lot of new urbanist thinking. Bike lanes are cool. Roundabouts are good. The Robert Street median has made driving on Robert feel a lot better. I actually love sidewalks and miss them terribly. There’s a lot Napier says that I’d like to see in West St. Paul. But I don’t think he’s the best candidate for mayor.

Mr. Fernandez, for his part, seemed fine. His policies were less specific. He several times repeated his rehearsed list of “five things” he wants to do for West Saint Paul. (None of them are especially interesting or original, but they’re fine; find ’em on his website.) Honestly, if you want my unflattering impression of him… he made me think of Marco Rubio. Telegenic yet not quite ready for prime time. But this also meant he was refreshingly to-the-point at moments.

One moment that seemed to sum up both candidates really well, though, made me just about stand up and clap for Mr. Fernandez:

MODERATOR:  What do you think of limiting the number of garbage trucks using our streets? Do you have any suggestions for it?

[Each candidate has two minutes to respond.]

Mr. Napier?

NAPIER: Ah, when this came up, I was not for it, I believed that free enterprise is important. However, one day a neighbor came up to me, this was probably six years ago or so, and asked, “Would you be willing to go with one hauler if I went around and got names and got everybody to agree to one hauler?” and we did. It has really changed our neighborhood. All the trash cans are out on one morning. It’s not a beautiful thing, but it is a beautiful thing, because once they’re gone we don’t see a truck for the rest of the week. I believe that working with the haulers was critical. We had the haulers come in to our work sessions. All the haulers that participated came in and agreed that they can reduce the amount down to four. So I believe that reducing the number down to four is important. Right now we have six on our license in our city. If we reduce it to four and grandfather in the ones that are in there, that way if somebody buys out another company, and it goes down to five, we’re not going to grant another one, to make it six. So if we can get down to four haulers, I think we’re getting toward where we need to be, because when frost comes out of our ground in March, we do not allow dump trucks on the streets, because they ruin the streets. But we allow garbage trucks, which weigh just as much as a dump truck, five days a week. So we need to do that. I think it’s important for our infrastructure to protect it and our children walking down the street.

MODERATOR: Okay, Mr. Fernandez.

FERNANDEZ: I believe in limiting the number of days, but I don’t think it’s necessary to limit the amount of haulers.

MODERATOR: …Okay, next question.

That kinda says it all, doesn’t it? Napier with the long, winding answer where he tells a story about how his neighbors unanimously and voluntarily agreed to something as a justification for his government forcing everyone in the city to do something similar.

Fernandez with a simple, “nah.” (That wasn’t even Fernandez’s shortest answer of the night.)

Given what a nightmare Regular Saint Paul is going through right now with its misguided city takeover of trash hauling (if you give a mouse a monopoly…), I’m pretty suspicious of anyone who says they “used to” believe in “free enterprise” for trash haulers and later stopped believing in it, especially for the social-engineering reasons given by Napier. I really don’t care whether my neighbor’s trash cans are out, and, if you do, you’re a busybody. Stop it.

In conclusion, I’m voting Fernandez.

If you’d like an alternative view, I’ll point you to Kevin D. Hendricks’s blog. Mr. Hendricks has done yeoman’s work covering the West Saint Paul municipal elections in great detail. He has a different impression of the mayoral forum than I do, a much more in-depth recap of it, and asked both candidates some questions of his own before endorsing Napier.

For more information, you can also check out the other candidates forum.

Ward 2: John Justen vs. Jim Probst

This race is a little trickier. Neither John Justen nor Jim Probst (no website) has ever been on the city council before, so I can’t point at one of them and say, “This guy’s to blame for Robert Street! Vote the other guy!”

I don’t know for sure who’s best for the job here. I watched their first candidates’ forum. My impression was that John Justen brings expertise to the table. As a business owner on Robert Street (Eclipse Music, great store), he has a lot of depth on specific issues. Jim Probst brings connections; he’s been heavily involved with a number of key local organizations like the South Robert Street Business Association, the local Chamber of Commerce, and the Kiwanis.

Probst talked about our top priorities as being our taxes (they’re getting too high too fast) and economic development (we need a lot more businesses and jobs to get us out of this fiscal hole). Justen talked about our top priorities being our public relations, both internally and externally — building our shared community vision, sharing more information with the community, and fixing our government’s damaged reputation. I haven’t seen a lot of direct disagreement between the candidates, either here or elsewhere, so it’s difficult for me to form a judgment as to which is better. Both are quite likable.

When I drive down my street, I notice that nearly all the Napier supporters have Justen signs up, and nearly all the Fernandez supporters have Probst signs up. It happens way too often to be a coincidence. I don’t know what what that tells you. I’m guessing it has something to do with local political parties, but, ever since I resigned from the MN GOP in 2016 over the Trump nomination, I haven’t had any awareness of what either party’s organization is doing.

Right now, I’m leaning toward Jim Probst, largely because of his focus on the fiscal situation. Again, I’m for spending money when we have it… but we don’t. That makes fiscal responsibility really important right now, whereas I probably wouldn’t have made it a key voting issue in past elections.

Once again, Kevin Hendricks has a different perspective on this race, which I invite you to check out before committing to your final decision. Plus, there’s a second candidates’ forum that I am still hoping to watch before Election Day.

Ward 3: Dave Meisinger vs. Wendy Berry

Given everything I’ve said above about Robert Street, this should be an easy call. Dave Meisinger is sort of the tragic hero of the Robert Street story. He was elected mayor in order to stop our city from plunging the knife into our ledger, but, even with the power of the mayoral veto, he was unable to shake the council from its stubborn course. I’ve sung his praises several times already in this blog post. Now he’s back to try to win a seat on the council and carry us forward into a fiscally responsible future.

Meanwhile, Dave’s opponent, Wendy Berry, speaks positively on her website about the Robert Street rebuild, and touts endorsements from some of those involved in that project.

Plus, if I told you to vote for Dave, that would complete my trifecta of endorsing the exact opposite candidates of Kevin Hendricks.

So this should be easy: vote for Dave.

But hang on.

The elephant in the room I haven’t talked about yet is the truly bizarre, extremely sexist attacks on incumbent Mayor Jenny Halverson and another individual earlier this year. After a charged city council meeting where certain members were accused of applying a double standard to Mayor Halverson’s appointees, some nutter or nutters left a box of tampons at Mayor Halverson’s house under cover of darkness, rang the doorbell, and ran off. They then did the same thing to another woman, leaving her a box of kleenex.

Oh, and they also sabotaged her tires, as well as the tires of several other Halverson supporters, including John Justen (running in Ward 2) and Wendy Berry (running in this race).

Now, I’m not a big fan of Halverson. She has backed Robert Street to the hilt. But this kind of late-night, sexually charged intimidation of our elected mayor is a really ugly thing that brought our city statewide attention in the worst possible way. We already have a President who is on tape displaying the deepest contempt for women. We absolutely must not accept our local politics degenerating into the same misogynist circus.

What’s this have to do with Dave Meisinger?

Well, first there is some reason to believe that Meisinger was the individual responsible for the incident.

Second, around the time all this went down, Meisinger was in a political discussion about this incident on the City Pages website. He was speaking with a woman named Andrea Honeycutt when he lost his temper and called her a “cunt:”

Meisinger’s comment has since been deleted, but the rest of the thread is still there today. (Thanks to Kevin Hendricks for grabbing the screenshot.)

And calling a woman the c-word in an online posting is clearly inexcusable.

Look. We’ve all had to make some tough choices in politics lately. We’ve all had to decide whether to vote for a bad person in order to prevent an even worse outcome. Many of you watched me agonize last fall about whether to vote for the manifestly vicious Trump in order to stop Clinton, who would destroy so many causes I care about so much. Tonight, a lot of Minnesota Democrats are agonizing over whether to vote for Keith Ellison, despite credible abuse allegations against him, in order to stop Doug Wardlow, whom they perceive as a grave threat to justice. (I think they’re wrong about Wardlow, who will be a great A.G., but they come by their belief honestly.) In those statewide and federal races, yes, your vote carries life-or-death consequences for real people no matter how you decide.

But the West Saint Paul Ward 3 City Council election isn’t one of those races. Robert Street is important, but it isn’t as important as standing up for a positive environment free of harassment in our own city hall. Whether or not Meisinger is personally responsible for the harassment campaign that happened in April, his City Page comment using the “c-word” shows that Dave Meisinger is very much part of the problem. Despite his good work on Robert Street, he should not be returned to City Hall.

Wendy Berry will probably not pursue policies that are (in my opinion) good for the city, but her opponent is part of a toxic environment that needs to be eradicated yesterday. I respectfully suggest you vote for Wendy Berry.

Ballot Question: Sales & Use Tax

Well, this stinks. Even if we agree to vote out the people who are responsible for the Robert Street fiscal disaster, we can’t fix the problems they created. Robert Street put us in debt and we now have to find other money in order to pay for our other obligations. Could a sales and use tax be the answer?

Yes, but I think it’s a bad answer, for these reasons:

(1) Sales taxes are regressive. That is, a sales tax hurts poor people more than it hurts wealthy people, essentially punishing them for being poor. This is because poor people need to spend a much greater percentage of their income on local goods and services just to get by, whereas rich people can save their income, invest it, and more easily spend it elsewhere. (After all, we’ve all got Amazon Prime. For the folks south of Annapolis, that’s… less likely.) This is not how a tax should work, especially not in an area marked by fairly stark income differences.

There are some circumstances where a regressive tax is unavoidable (you can’t set bus fares as a percentage of rider income), but they should be avoided wherever possible. I don’t see an argument for having a regressive tax here except, “I want to avoid a property tax hike and don’t care if low-income people on the West Side have to help me pay for it.” It’s not a big deal to a lot of us, but, if you’re living paycheck-to-paycheck, maybe with some government assistance in the mix, every dollar counts, and the $50-60 a year this will cost you is a meaningful amount of money.

(2) Two, the iron law of taxes is, if you tax something, you get less of it. All candidates for higher office in West Saint Paul right now seem to agree that what West Saint Paul needs more than anything right now is more businesses and stronger development on Robert Street. So let’s not discourage them by taxing the sales that keep them in business! That just does long-term damage to the city for the sake of hiding the costs of the city’s own fiscal mismanagement.

I know the argument from sales-tax advocates is, “Well, it’s not that much money.” But five cents out of every ten dollars for every sale in this city adds up, or they wouldn’t be insisting we need this revenue stream. If it adds up to a meaningful number for the city, it adds up to a meaningful number for businesses… and, again, I don’t see a reason to risk it when we other, more accountable revenue streams available.

(3) The sales-tax proposal is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. The current municipal fiscal crunch will pass in a few years. If this ballot question included an expiration date, I’d feel a lot better about it. But once we have a sales tax, it will never, ever, ever go away. I’m not cool with that.

(4) People talk a lot about the sales-tax aspect of this thing, but I’ve heard nobody say word one about the use-tax aspect. Do you realize what an unholy mess this is? I looked up the Minnesota Department of Revenue’s use tax fact sheet. Turns out that, under a use tax, all residents/businesses in West Saint Paul become required to track all our purchases made outside the city of West Saint Paul. If we then use any of those items inside the city of West Saint Paul, we are required to pay the city the equivalent sales tax on the item’s original purchase value!

So if I buy a book from Barnes & Noble in Eagan (which has no use tax) for $8.00 and bring it back to WSP to read, I’m supposed to report that purchase on my tax return, then pay $0.04 to WSP as “use tax!” And that applies to every purchase I make outside this city!

Now, I imagine the city has no interest in enforcing this against individuals, but imagine you’re a small business trying to figure out how to get yourself set up in West Saint Paul, looking at purchases that go into the tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars (which is where a 0.5% use tax suddenly becomes real meaningful). Is the use tax something that encourages you or discourages you to open your shop here? How about when you consider that South Saint Paul is just down the road?

(5) Maybe above all else, I just don’t think it’s a good idea to reward the fiscal mismanagement of our city by giving those responsible a get-out-of-jail-free card. Yes, money is going to be tight for a while. Yes, the city is going to try to get that money out of our property taxes… and they may have no choice. But it seems to me that there’s a huge moral hazard in teaching the city that they’re free to run our balance into the red because we’ll bail them out at the ballot box. They need to learn to live within their means, and that starts now… even if it means we have to lower our sights for upcoming infrastructure projects, even if it means delayed road repair in some places until this fiscal crisis ends, even if it means some property tax hikes for us. If it preserves our good business climate until the Robert-induced fiscal crisis is over, it’s a win.

So I am going to vote No on the sales tax, and I encourage you to do the same.

As usual, you can find an opposing viewpoint in Kevin Hendricks.

Find anything inaccurate in this post? Let me know and I’ll see whether it’s something that ought to be fixed. As usual, if I receive any responses from any campaign, I will post it in full on the blog.

UPDATE 12:15 PM: Actually, it looks like my wife and I will be in the hospital until after election day, so, my apologies, but I won’t be able to respond to anything after all.