This letter was also sent to the county administrator and Cook County commissioners
If the proposed 2018 Cook County tax statement I received recently is a joke, I am not laughing. My property value went down 6.2 percent but my proposed taxes went up 32.3 percent with little or no detailed explanation as to why. What am I missing here?
To give you an idea of how outrageous this proposal is, if it went through without change I would be paying almost the same in taxes for my little cabin in Lutsen as I do for my main home in Florida that has a market value for taxation of over twice that of my cabin. I am complaining as a seasonal property owner, but resident owners are also outraged over the proposed taxes as indicated by the November 27 meeting and recent letters to the editor.
If I am reading the “Cook County by the Numbers” correctly, seasonal property owners own almost twice the number of units as the resident owners and pay 47.5 percent of all property taxes without being able to vote in local elections for representation. That is a significant proportion of taxes collected and I am afraid has become the cash cow for all the big city things Cook County, and Grand Marais in particular, want to have. I can tell you that most of the seasonal property owners I know are not rich and they all have worked hard to be able to enjoy two homes. They also don’t come “up North” to go to the YMCA, use a daycare center, use the hospital (which is trying to be more and more like a hospital would be in a city of 250,000 residents), use the schools, etc. They come up to enjoy the woods, lakes and nature in general and usually for only short periods of time.
Fewer and fewer young people are interested in the “up North” experience or purchasing a cabin. When the interest in seasonal properties in Cook County diminishes because of this and other factors like its reputation for increasing taxes every year as property values go down, your ability to fund “nice to have” projects will become more and more difficult. In addition, if some of the new federal government tax legislation goes through concerning second homes I predict a budgetary disaster if your spending habits don’t change.
Jim Peterson
Lutsen
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