City of Sioux Falls promotes property tax increases
The city’s finance director is pushing for a property tax increase again this year. I found this proposal interesting considering the mayor is increasing the budget next year for pools. The city can only use the money for OPERATING expenses. So while they CANNOT spend the money on capital improvements they can use the money to fix potholes and pay lifeguards.
2022 Property Tax $84.9 M – 37%
2022 Assessed Value, 80% Residential, 37% Commercial
ASSESSED VALUE OF SINGLE-UNIT RESIDENTIAL PROPERTIES, $200K – $317.7K, 34%
As you can see, residential property taxes are the biggest chunk of property taxes paid. In other words we are OVERTAXING residential property owners to subsidize things like $25 million dollar parking ramps for condo dwellers.
When people talk about TIFs or rebates for large developers they claim there is this mysterious ROI, even though NO independent study has been done to show us what that ROI is. I would argue that a residential property owner actually has a higher ROI, besides the taxes they pay to help with street and curb and gutter improvements, they may hire a lawn care company or hire a contractor to do work to their property, creating actual jobs.
I have argued for a long time we have NO reason to increase property taxes each year because of natural growth. If we also started taxing commercial properties at their actual legal assessment (and not a reduced TIF assessment) we would also haul in millions in property tax revenue.
Once again, the city is sticking it to the little guy so the big guy has a small tax bill.