My staff and I have been working on some statistical analysis of the City’s property tax policies and practices over the past four years. The City’s has taken a couple of metaphorical punches lately that our property taxing behavior has been out of the mainstream. Well, when I want to determine if anything is out of the mainstream, I first must figure out what the “mainstream” is. For the City of Eden Prairie, we usually define the mainstream as the Municipal Legislative Commission (MLC) cities. These are the cities within the Twin Cities metro area that are most like our city. We are alike demographically, geographically, and we all received very little (if any) financial assistance from the State government to support our local municipal operations.
I think the best measure of our property tax burden is the Net Levy. I think it’s the best measure because it really is the net tax burden that we impose on our residents through the property tax formula. Using the Net Property Tax Levy as the measure and the MLC cities as the “mainstream”, here’s how Eden Prairie has performed during the period 2003-2006 . The link will take you to an 8-page PDF of a memorandum that i prepared for the City Council explaining the data.
If you don’t like taxes, (and who does, really?) this information will not impress you. If you are, however, interested in how differently comparable communities in the Twin Cities have taxed their respective property taxpayers to finance their municipal operations, then you might find this information quite interesting.Â
My summation of the data: Eden Prairie: Not Bad. Not bad at all.Â
