Say Anything Blog

The Grand Forks Herald:

One issue on the June ballot may be a home rule charter that would allow county commissioners to levy a 1 cent sales tax to pay debt service on the new county jail.

Right now, that debt is being paid off out of county residents’ property taxes. At the current rate, it will take about 17 years to pay the jail debt in full, Nelson said. The cost to residents on their property tax bills this year is about $37 on a $100,000 home, she said.

Proceeds from a 1 cent sales tax would pay off the jail debt in about four years, Nelson said. In preliminary discussions, county commissioners honed in on the 1 cent sales tax figure, but that amount could be adjusted before the issue comes to a referendum based on the will of voters, Commission Chairwoman Connie Triplett said....

Mostly this is old news but since the dysfunctional county commission is moving forward on it I think I need to keep track of it.

What gets me is that to this date the county commission has not said one thing about looking for budget cuts in order to help pay for this.

For those of you that don’t the county commission went ahead and built this jail while telling the public that it wouldn’t cost the taxpayers a thing. They planned to build big and make money by housing federal prisoners.  When their business plan turned out to be flawed they claimed they weren’t responsible and fired the jail administrator.

The big question is why we would we want the county to be in the business of providing a jail.  Certainly they are a necessity, but you build what you need and don’t look to make money out of brining criminals to our city.  I doubt the commission could come up with an answer. 

And why has the Herald done numerous stories on the jail and failed to mention that we were promised no tax increase for the jail?  While we’re at it why don’t they ask the county commission what cost savings measures they’ve adopted to make up for their errors.  (The only cost savings I’ve heard are in the jail to help it lose less money.)

As I pointed out in this post the overall budget of the county is up 50% in inflation adjusted dollars since 1997.  They’re not providing more services so cut the fat, don’t tax us.

The Herald article did manage to throw in a bit of campaigning for the tax increase by mentioning that the poll the county paid for (with our money again) said the sales tax was supported by 56% of the people.  Well they paid for the poll and they got the result they paid for.  How about they do a poll and ask if we want the sales tax or would rather the county makes up the budget by rolling back previous over-inflation spending increases?

Despite the poll I don’t see much support for another county tax being approved by the voters provided the word gets out.  Just last summer the county tried sneaking a new tax for 911 service onto the voters.  They had next to zero public notice and didn’t even have most polling places open.  The voters still found a way to turn down the tax increase, much to the surprise of the Grand Forks Herald. 
Here’s one other story I’ve done on the issue.