For many years, politicians and elected officials have tried to convince citizens that increasing taxes is a great way for the country, county or city to prosper. The only problem is I can’t find one occurrence where increasing taxes has made any municipality prosper. If officials continue to frivolously spend any new tax increases, the municipality will have a shortfall and will need to increase tax levies. If the county has an Economic Development group, their main focus is to distribute county tax dollars into projects that will generate more tax revenue for the county. Many development groups fail to fulfill tax seeking revenues. Does this sound familiar?
A few years ago, Cook County spent a large sum of taxpayer money on the premise that the National Golf Course was going to bring a lot of people to the county and add to the tax revenue. Since the county put a boat load of money into the course, we are now using county tax revenues to supplement annual overages. Instead of increasing the Cook County tax revenue it is a cash cow for the county.
Cook County decided to dive into another losing proposition by building a YMCA and telling the taxpayers that after construction, the YMCA would stand alone and would not take taxpayer revenues to pay for annual overages. Since the completion of construction, Cook County taxpayers have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual overages because the commissioners signed a management agreement that has no cap on the amount of annual overages. The city put in a $110,000 cap on overages but the commissioners failed to do so. Now this project will add to the list of non-prosperity projects after increasing taxes.
Now, the EDA is trying to quickly push through another losing proposition to use taxpayers’ money to build a residential structure to house middle management employees from a few businesses in the Lutsen-Tofte area. This is by no means low income housing. In the resolution, the county and the EDA have not provided accurate numbers or references in the document. They want to have a public meeting on February 28th to get input from taxpayers on the resolution. What kind of input can taxpayers give when reviewing a flawed resolution? Here we go again spending taxpayer money to dive into another proposition that has no sign of generating more tax revenue into the county funds.
It is plain to see that Cook County has a long record of spending taxpayer money on losing propositions that generate long term financial debt for our county. If taxing is the best way to prosperity, why after multiple years of large increases in tax levies have the county tax revenues dropped over those same years? Commissioners must focus on controlled spending (not buying a single axle truck for over $200,000), reviewing accurate data prior to spending and only spending county funds for the wellbeing of all residents and projects that will increase tax revenues instead of careless spending of taxpayer dollars.
The answer is simple, you can’t tax your way to prosperity and Cook County has proven this over and over again.
Jim Vannet
Hovland
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