North Dakota Local Taxes

Yesterday I wrote a post responding to a post on Tom Dennis’s Blog. Tom is the Editor of the Grand Forks Herald’s Editorial page. Tom didn’t agree with everything I had written and wrote a rebuttal. I had some major disagreements with his post yesterday but I think that maybe we aren’t all that far apart in what he wrote today.

If local property taxes are such an outrageous burden, why do North Dakota voters so consistently elect “status quo” council and school-board members? Why isn’t there a majority of tax-cut advocates on the Grand Forks School Board, the Grand Forks City Council or anywhere else?

The answer there is two fold. First of all property taxes have historically been tolerable. Nobody likes to pay property taxes but plenty of people like the government to spend money on them. Up until a few years Grand Forks had a pretty good balance. However in recent years the city has been increasing spending much faster than the rate of inflation. That means that the unreasonable tax burden is a relatively new thing.
The other thing is that the big spenders have had the effrontery to actually blame the state legislature for their irresponsible spending growth. The local taxing entities in the larger cities (city, school boards, county and in some places the park board) have increased their spending while local property values have gone up. They didn’t need to. But they thought they would get away with it because they weren’t increasing the tax rate. Of course the average tax payer doesn’t give a hoot what the tax rate is, they care about their tax bill that has been going up much faster than their income.
The voters are just becoming worked up over the issue of rising property taxes. However there’s a bit of confusion due to the misdirection being played by the big spenders. At the end of his post Dennis says that the voters are proud to pay for the services that they are receiving. If that were the case then the spenders wouldn’t be blaming the folks at the state for taxes going sky-high.
There is a lot of confusion about property taxes. I’ve talked to a city council member who says he get’s the blame for the high property taxes when the city only gets 22% of the property taxes. Maybe the local media could cover the spending issue.

My basic point is that if taxpayers in Grand Forks or anywhere else are upset about local property taxes, then those taxpayers should throw the rascals out. Voters should send packing the local school board, City Council and other officials who’re making their taxes go up.
And isn’t that a better and fairer method of disciplining those officials than the one being debated in Bismarck, in which state lawmakers will “channel” taxpayers’ supposed outrage and limit city and school-district tax-and-spenders from on high?

I actually agree with Tom Dennis’s solution. Hold the local elected officials responsible. However the state legislature feels obligated to bail out the local taxpayers. But they’re smart enough to realize that if they do that it will take the pressure off of the locals to hold the line on spending. This is like paying off the teenager’s credit card. Unless you impose some kind of discipline the kids going to keep spending and spending.
Dennis pointed out that maybe things aren’t all bad:

“North Dakota’s State/Local Tax Burden Among Nation’s Lowest.” North Dakota is 37th in the nation;

I think that’s a bit misleading. Is Dennis claiming that property taxes haven’t been climbing at twice the rate of inflation. In fact according to a story in his paper local property tax bills went up 7.6 last December! I have a question. Did our services we received actually go up 7.6% last year?
The other thing is that North Dakota is one of the most rural states. The problem with out of control property taxes is in the large cities where property values have climbed. From what I can tell smaller localities have been fairly responsible.
I don’t think you can claim that property taxes in Grand Forks are low by referring to state-wide data.
And maybe we’re just used to being a low tax state and we want to keep it that way.