Grand Forks Taxes Are Out of Control

The North Dakota American’s for Prosperity have issued an excellent report on taxes in Grand Forks. As you may remember I was doing some work on this a year ago but I just ran out of time to work on this. Their findings are much more in depth than mine but show the picture I was trying to show.
You can get their report here: As you can see it covers all four government entities that tax us poor folks. I’ve just started going over it and I think that I’ll just post on different topics in here as I get time.
Two of the main points are covered in graphs at the start of the report. Just covering those two is a good start:

As you can see in inflation adjusted dollars property taxes are way up. The Park Board increased their taxes 74%! The County increased their tax take 72%! The School District raised their’s 39% and even though the city had an unacceptably high increase of 28% they were the least bad.
Here’s another graph that really put things in perspective on school spending and state support:

This graph appears to not be in inflation adjusted dollars. On the other hand you can easily see that spending has gone up and up while enrollment has gone down. Over this time the state’s increased their funding by quite a bit but they haven’t been able to keep pace with the big spenders on the School Board.
This graph really puts a lie to the blame game that goes on in the school board that high property taxes are the fault of the state. The ones to blame are the school board who have three priorities: 1)the administration; 2) The Faculty; and 3)The students. The taxpayers aren’t even on their radar screen.
The folks at AFP are due a lot of credit. Digging out this information isn’t easy with all of these different governmental entities. (Something confirmed by Herald reporter Tu-Uyen Tran). Speaking of Tu-Uyen (North Dakota’s best reporter) he covered this story in the Herald and on his blog. Make sure you hit his blog as he’s got a lot more detail there than in his Herald story.
I understand that AFP is going to be covering the other cities in the state with this kind of scrutiny. I think that’s great for everyone that lives in the state except some of the elected officials who might not like people looking over their shoulders.