Proposed 15 Percent City Tax Hike a Worry, Roseville Residents Say

The Roseville Council heard from members of the public last week about the preliminary $44 million 2013 budget that .

Roseville residents spoke of the financial strain the increased taxes would put on their personal finances.

Karen Schaffer, a Roseville Council candidate, called the tax hike “rather high and startling.”

Roseville resident Dick Houck said that the council needs to remember that there “are a lot of people in this country living on fixed incomes or no incomes.

“When you become public servants, you’re spending other people’s money and it’s very easy to say, ‘Well, we need this and we need that and we’ll just grab some more money from the people,’” he said. “When you do that, the people who are living on fixed incomes are doing without [but] there seems to be no sense of the government doing without.”

Schaffer questioned whether Roseville needs as many costly infrastructure improvements as other similarly sized cities.

“I’m wondering if the peer city comparison, which I understand to be all metro cities [with populations of] 10,000 or more, is the correct group,” she said. “I wonder if we wouldn’t be more informed if we were comparing ourselves to other communities more like us in terms of infrastructure mix or age of housing—just the population alone seems to have a weakness. It’s possible we’re not as far below our peer group as we thought we were.”

Council members Jeff Johnson and Tammy McGehee said they were interested in looking at whether the peer group of cities can be more specialized. Roseville finance director Chris Miller said that, if given a list of criteria, the city staff could come up with a tailored list of peer cities.

If the budget passes, it would mean an $8.88 per month increase in property taxes for a median-valued home and a $6.81 per month increase in water and sewer rates.

Much of the increase comes from $1.6 million in debt service costs from 2011 and 2012 bonds.

Roseville structures its budgets in a two-year cycle and 2013 is the second year of the biennium.  To see a recent Patch story on the proposed 2013 Roseville budget

Future key dates in budget process:

• Sept. 10: Adopt preliminary, not-to-exceed tax levy
• Dec. 3: Annual truth-in-taxation hearing
• Dec. 10: Adopt final tax levy and budget

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