Director’s Notes

We wrote in the September issue about committees meeting whose work will affect municipality’s options for funding their infrastructure needs. A couple of those have settled a bit, and major funding sources are being proposed for both school districts and counties.

The Governor’s Blue Ribbon Task Force on Education has concluded its meetings, and among other things, will be recommending funding to increase teacher pay that will amount to at least $75 million. The Governor will still need to decide what to do with that recommendation, but it would be surprising if there weren’t some movement in that direction. The preferred way to fund that seemed to be with additional state sales tax. The other group that will impact city efforts this year was the County Government Study Committee, which also finished its work and will recommend several pieces of legislation, including one to allow the counties to implement a local option sales tax, and another to require cities to pay counties for public safety, based on population within city limits.

The SDML has always opposed allowing any other government to have a sales tax – it is too important a revenue source, making up around 50% of all revenue, and 70% of tax revenue, for our municipalities. We’ve long seen what happens when other entities get into a revenue source we need – cities get shoved out – you don’t need to look any further than the property tax to see the mere 12-14% cities receive of that shared source.

But the far more disturbing thought process belongs with the bill that would have cities pay an extra amount to counties for county public safety costs, completely ignoring the fact that city residents are also county citizens, and pay county property taxes. Consider the following information from the state’s five largest counties: j Minnehaha County – 82.6% of county property taxes are paid by those inside city limits j Pennington County – 71% of county property taxes are paid by those inside city limits j Lincoln County – 69.3% of county property taxes are paid by those inside city limits j Brown County – 46.2% of county property taxes are paid by those inside city limits j Brookings County – 52.6% of county property taxes are paid by those inside city limits

City residents are already paying county taxes. Asking them to pay again for the same services is just double dipping.

The SDML Board of Directors will meet December 9 to make their final determination of what bills we will bring forward, and what positions we’ll take on other legislation. They will also be meeting jointly that day with the County Associations, and we hope to find legislation we can work on to help each other.

Please feel free to contact me or any of the Board members with your thoughts on these, or any other issues.

Until next month, remember we are always available at 1-800-658-3633 or yvonne@sdmunicipalleague.org and please have a blessed holiday season and a happy, healthy new year!

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