Is the City of Sioux Falls hoarding tax dollars?
l3wis If you watch the city council informational meeting today you will see a presentation on the city’s reserves;
The city has over $80 million in reserves and many councilors questioned why it was so high. Of course the finance director did his best telling councilors we needed to have record reserves to save for a rainy day (or a derecho).
There are two reasons why we are at this point, the first one is the obvious flush of Federal money. As I understand it the city had many projects planned with our own capital before the pandemic and once the money started flowing in the city started allocating ARPA money to these projects instead of city capital. We can argue all we want about the ethics of that kind of budgeting, but I think the public is really in the dark about how this works. Of course the finance director started questioning the Federal bailouts and blaming them for massive inflation which is hilarious coming from a dude who gladly cashed the Fed’s checks.
The second reason we have record reserves is that we are being overtaxed. This of course was NOT brought up by the finance director during the meeting but councilor Neitzert touched on it by saying there is a perception that the city is hoarding money and they shouldn’t be doing that.
This has been my argument all along against increasing city property taxes every year. The city has the revenue, but more importantly with our population and development growth (almost $2 billion last year) there is no reason to increase these taxes and fees due to natural economic growth.
So why are we in this position? Because of indiscriminate tax rebates and TIFs to developers. If we eliminated this high-end socialist welfare system to wealthy developers we could keep our property taxes down.
We also need to stop giving money away to play palaces.
We can’t on one hand and say we are in dire straits then turnaround and throw millions away on amenities and wants. We are either one or the other. The city coffers are NOT a savings account, they collect fees and taxes and spend them on the social welfare of our city.
If I were a city councilor I would propose a one-time city property tax rebate and chip away at the city’s trough.
