By a three to two vote, the Cook County commissioners set the 2018 property tax levy at 17.5 percent at the board’s Tuesday, December 12 meeting.
Cook County Auditor/Treasurer Braidy Powers said a 17.5 percent levy would bring in $9,236,751, up from the $7,863,947 collections for 2017.
Expenses for 2018 are expected to be $23,539,873.
Voting for the tax hike were commissioners Myron Bursheim, Jan Sivertson and Ginny Storlie. Voting against—for opposite reasons— were commissioners Bobby Deschampe and Heidi Doo-Kirk.
Deschampe said he opposed setting a high levy because it would hurt people living on Social Security and others living on fixed or low incomes.
Doo-Kirk praised the committee who came up with the 17.5 percent levy but said she regretted last year voting for an 11.2 percent levy when the board should have set it at 19.9 percent. Early this fall the commissioners set a preliminary levy at 19.9 percent.
Commissioners have stated all along that they wanted to balance the budget this year without using the fund balance so next year and beyond they could set lower levies. The county must maintain 75 percent or higher in its fund balance to keep its top bond rating. The higher the score, the cheaper it costs the county to purchase bonds for big projects.
According to the Minnesota Department of Revenue, preliminary 2018 property tax levies for all counties will total approximately
$3.160 billion. That is up from collections of $3.019 billion in 2017, a 4.7 levy increase.
To reduce the levy from 19.9 percent, cuts were made in future purchases for the Highway Department and $60,000 in revenue from a federal grant to Health & Human Services was used to bring the total down, said Powers.
Additionally, said Powers, requests from non-mandated services of $221,000 were pared to $147,300.
Included in those was an application for $40,000 from Tofte Township that would be used for the Birch Grove Community Center operation. Commissioners granted $19,000 to Tofte.
The Grand Marais Art Colony asked for $15,000 and received $9,500; Cook County Higher Education requested $20,000 and received $13,500. Cooperation Station Daycare asked for $3,300 and received nothing.
At 17.5 percent, Cook County will once again have the highest levy for all Minnesota counties. Traverse County was the next highest with a proposed levy of 9.8 percent. Once set, that number can’t go up. It can stay the same or go down. Next door neighbor Lake County had a proposed levy of 4.5 percent as did adjoining St. Louis County. It’s not known at this time whether those levies have been finalized or not.
Big Stone, Pope, and Crow Wings counties had a 2018 zero increase in property tax levy, and Chippewa (.7 percent), Houston (.5 percent), Jackson (.7 percent), Yellow Medicine (.8 percent) and Lyon (1 percent) counties were all one percent or lower.
Kittson County commissioners proposed a -0.8 percent levy, the lowest of all Minnesota’s 87 counties.
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