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FALCON HEIGHTS CITY COUNCIL MINUTES Apri128, 2004 -10- Consideration of Resolutions 04-10 and 04-11 regarding turn back of Hamline Roselawn and Hoyt Avenues from Ramsey County (continued) Council member Lamb said that property tax is the most regressive of all taxes and this is going to cost us property tax dollars. People who are retired and on a fixed income are under more and more pressure because of property taxes. We talk about affordable housing all the time and all tax does is push up the cost of housing, making it more expensive to live. We really need to back up off of this thing and start thinking about, in a broad picture, what we are going to do to stop this shift of responsibility from higher government to lower government, and stop the shift of cost from higher government to lower government, because we are the lower government. The only opportunity we have to raise revenues is through the property tax which, in his opinion, is the worst of all taxes, and then they come and limit our ability to even manage the local revenues. The question here is not whether Hamline or Roselawn are in bad shape. That is obvious. We have 2,000 taxpayers. Ramsey County has about 100,000. We need, in a comprehensive way, to sit down with the County, other cities, and ultimately the State of Minnesota, to figure out how to stop this shift of responsibility from the higher levels of government to the lower, and essentially to stop the cost shift from other types of revenue raising things to the property tax revenue. So, I am voting against this. Even if you are inclined to support this, what I would ask you to do is to think about why we are asked here, two days before the deadline, with no real consideration of our budget, no real consideration of the policies we have worked on regarding taxes and reserves, no real consideration of what it does to the cost of affordable housing. We have two days in order to apply for MSA for 2005. I think we ought to vote no and take the time to really assess what this question is going to do to us and ask ourselves, as the representatives of the 2,000 taxpayers in this city, if we really want to assume the long term liability for these streets on our taxpayers. Mayor Gehrz said that she agreed with most of what Council member Lamb said, in terms of shifts that have been happening, but one thing that she really wants to say is that she is not sure this is the way to do it. The issue of transfer of streets of all types between State and County, County and City, has been going on for a long time. This isn't something that just happened this year. In fact, in our budget considerations, when we looked at our 10 year plan that staff prepared for us, we did have Roselawn and Hamline in those figures. So, we have seen this before. This isn't something that has just come up two days before. Council member Lamb said that the whole issue has not been discussed in any great depth. He agrees that there are some numbers in that budget that cover some eventualities. The fact is that every dollar that we spend to assume this responsibility that we are being asked to pick up is a dollar less than we have to maintain the City that we have today. We can talk about the different sources of funding that are available. That is just the old government tax shell game. We have a responsibility to maintain this City. The County has the responsibility to maintain the County roads. And, before we take on any of what is the County's responsibility today, we may need more than an hour and fifteen minutes of discussion two days before the MSA filing. to