I was asked to testify to the Senate Tax Committee a couple of weeks ago by Senator Ortman, who represents our district and is chair of the committee. I followed a couple of presentations on history of property taxes and a committee tasked with proposing different ways to tax property in the state of Minnesota. There was some good discussion around both of these presentations and the idea of bi-partisan ideas and governance was not really very evident during these exchanges. I believe one could have distinguished between the two parties while wearing a blindfold and not knowing who was speaking.
My testimony was limited to the end of the session and I focused on two main points during the ten minutes or so that I was fortunate enough to have in front of the Senators. The first being the equalization of local levies and what that has done for, or to, us in the seven years I have been here. This appeared to be interesting to the committee and the fact that while the amount of dollars in our equalized levies has remained somewhat constant over really the last nine years, the amount of state equalization of these has dropped from nearly 44% coming from the state to currently around 9%, and even less a couple years ago before the drop in home prices.
The second point of my testimony dealt with the inequities of districts with “high property wealth and low property wealth”. What I demonstrated to the committee was the fact that Central Public Schools has a $500 per pupil operating levy in place and this costs our district homeowners $101 per $100,000 of home value. Mound-Westonka Public Schools, just to our East, has a $1,480 per pupil operating levy in place and that amount, 3 times ours, costs their district homeowners $111 per $100,000 of home value. Put another way, for our students to have the same funding, and the opportunities that provides they would need to contribute about $300 per $100,000 of value, something that would be a real burden on our district residents. We will see if there is anything that comes from this group’s work as the session moves along, but you could certainly let your views be known to the group, they represent you.