Letter to the Editor
- Guest Author
- Dec 16, 2025
- 2 min read
To the Editor:
#1. 2026 will be another tough year for residents and businesses. It started last spring when valuation notices went out. If you had Commercial/Business property you probably saw a very large increase in your valuations. Or if you had land that was previously classified as AG Homestead and changed to Residential Homestead, the tax on your land doubled from .5 to 1.0. Or in the city of Sebeka, because of sales, your valuation increased 30% in one year. THERE MAY BE other examples, but even if there was no levy increase from the County, School, and City/TS, your share of these county and school taxes would have increased dramatically. The time to check and question changes is in the spring, every year. Request your field card and see what changed. The valuations determine your share of County, School, and City/Township levies.
#2. The second thing that changed is in St. Paul in the 2024 and 2025 legislature sessions the state wasted a 18B surplus, added 6B in new taxes and are now running at a day to day deficit. First, they pushed things that had been paid by income taxes to Real Estate taxes. And they are STILL MANDATED. Along with that they passed a lot of new programs that are not needed nor wanted by most taxpayers. These increased the county levy by hundreds of thousands. The last thing we need are more state programs that come with requirements and rules, whether it comes with some funding or not.
And then there is #3, the County, State, and School levies, which are affected by #1 and #2. Levies are dollar amounts based on your share. There are things we can control and I think we need to cut the things we can control. That will be painful whatever the cuts happen to be. There were some cuts from the preliminary (17%) to the final budget (9 or 10%), but not enough to help our taxpayers. Instead the board will probably spend from reserves. That may be good or bad, but it’s kicking the can down the road. There will be too few actual cuts and that $200,000 PLUS is still in next year’s levy. $200 K + another round of wage and benefit increases + a state that is overdrawn = a 10% levy increase to start in 2027 taxes.
Along with other legitimate increases means things will get worse.
Commissioner Murlyn Kreklau
