Oakdale City Council Supports Lowering Tax Levy by $49,000

Oakdale City Council members said they favor a 2012 tax levy option that could slightly cut the city portion of some businesses’ property taxes while still re-starting contributions into the city’s capital improvement planning fund and parks funds, at their workshop meeting Tuesday, Aug. 9.

Under this plan, the city should have the money to pay to i at , as requested by the Oakdale Athletic Association, in 2012, said Oakdale Finance Director Suzy Warren.

Warren presented three possible city tax levy scenarios to the council that ranged from maintaining the city’s current tax levy, to cutting the levy by $99,000. Council members said they favored the middle-of-the-road option, which would cut the city’s tax levy by $49,000 from 2011 while still cutting the amount of city taxes paid by a sample business—a small barbershop—by $8.30.

The goal in cutting businesses’ taxes even a little would be to help them see a smaller increase in property taxes than they might otherwise due to changes in state tax law, said Oakdale City Administrator Craig Waldron.

“(The city’s) is actually a pretty small portion of that commercial property tax,” Warren said. “Obviously, because we’re a pro-business community, we want to continue to do everything that we can to do our part in that, but it is a very complex and dynamic system.”

Under the plan, $100,000 each would go into the city’s parks fund and capital improvement planning fund. As a budget-cutting measure, the city stopped paying into those funds in 2011, Warren said at a previous meeting.

“There’s a real prudency in having enough to be able to respond to situations,” she said. “We’ll be at a point where this will allow us to recover.”

Mayor Carmen Sarrack agreed that putting money into the funds again is the responsible choice.

“We’ve always been really thoughtful about councils that are going to come after us,” he said. “We could cut a lot of stuff and push it down the road like the state and federal governments do, and let somebody worry about it in four or five years, but that’s not right either.”