Regarding Minneapolis' debt load: Wizard Marks wrote: >Paying those debts was doable had there not been such deep LGA cuts and had Ventura >not decided on tax rebates, etc.<
Even without the LGA cuts, the debts had to be paid, and HALF of the tax increases we face will go to pay them. And most of us are going to see much more than 8 percent a year because of rising home values and elimination of the mitigation that kept some homes' taxes from rising too fast. Yet St. Paul is managing better than we are, without raising taxes. Why? We spent ourselves into a big deep hole by using budget chicanery to hide the fact that we were spending faster than the money was coming in. The fault lies with us, not Ventura, not the legislature. We let the mayor and council get away with it. Tim Bonham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >Far more serious was a major change in the tax structure, decreasing the tax rates for commercial buildings & expensive houses, and increasing them for other (lower value) residential housing. This meant that all of a sudden, the pool of tax receipts on downtown business property that Minneapolis had counted on to pay off these debts (some of them incurred in supporting the building of this property in the first place) was suddenly gone!< It's possible that we wouldn't have the money even if the rates hadn't changed--because commercial property is worth less now because of overbuilding. On the positive side, the reduction in tax rates on rental properties has spurred a building boom in that area--which has stopped the rapid rise in rents. --M. G. Stinnett Jordan Neighborhood TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 2. If you don't like what's being discussed here, don't complain - change the subject (Mpls-specific, of course.) ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
