Tomorrow at 9:30am, St. Louis County will hold a public hearing in Duluth on a plan to raise $400+ million of new tax dollars over the course of the next 25 years by imposing a new half percent sales tax to support county road repair. The intent is to vote on this proposal by the end of the year (maybe as soon as Nov 25). I wonder how many of you have heard about this proposal before today? I wonder how many of our local retailers know about this proposal? My concern at this moment is the almost complete lack of awareness about this proposal. This is a $400M tax increase and there has been next to no public discussion or awareness. Compare that to the many months of public discussion and debate for our $18M proposal to support our West Duluth vision. We had a ton of public engagement for a $18M proposal that is a fraction of the size of the $400M county proposal. Of the $10.5M that this tax would raise annually (increasing over time) - $6M would be generated from businesses located in the city of Duluth and another $1M would be generated from businesses located in Hermantown. Interestingly, Duluth has less than 1.5% of the countys roads and Hermantown has about 2%. So, 65% of the revenue for the program would be raised in these two cities, but less than 4% of the streets supported are in those same cities. These are facts. They are facts that have not yet been brought to the attention of residents and taxpayers. There needs to be additional public discussion - holding public hearings on a weekday morning is not public discussion. Im not going to weigh in to say whether or not this is a good proposal. I certainly understand there are a lot of transportation needs out there and the county has 3000 miles of mostly rural roads to take care of. I am certainly open to hearing more about how the county intends to distribute these dollars and the benefit of their proposal. Its a discussion that deserves to be had. This is moving way too fast - the county has not engaged the public on this issue, there is not awareness of this proposed tax, and I have been told that the votes are there, this is going to happen. If those votes are so firmly in place, they should have no problem engaging the public in an open discussions of the merits. Right? Were you aware of this new tax proposal? Would you like to hear more details? More public discussion? More opportunity to provide feedback prior to a vote of the county board?
Posted on: Mon, 17 Nov 2014 20:32:28 +0000
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