The Minnesota Legislature funds many projects requested by cities and counties in its bonding bill. These funds pay for the bricks-and-mortar portion of projects that cities and counties can’t finance very easily with property-tax dollars coming from their tax base.

The difficult job for the Legislature is selecting the projects to fund, since the requests greatly exceed the money available. To help legislators make a decision, we propose an additional criterion to be required for selection: That the city or county identify the source of funding for the on-going staffing, operations and maintenance of the proposed project.

Many taxpayers don’t realize that the majority of costs over the life of a facility are those, the on-going costs, not the initial capital or construction costs.

A good case in point are the 11 bonding requests that the City of St Paul submitted for consideration. Many of these requests — to rehabilitate several existing bridges, libraries and recreational facilities — make sense because the funds will be used to maintain existing public assets.

However, requests to fund the proposed Mississippi River Learning Center, the Mississippi River Balcony, and a Multi-sport Athletic Facility — to the tune of $83 million – will create new capital facilities that will require increases in future property tax to pay for ongoing operations and maintenance.  These requests are from a city that just last year levied a new 1-percent sales tax to help pay for the maintenance costs of roads and recreation facilities because it lacked the property tax capacity to do so.

How does this make good financial sense? Is this responsible financial management?

The legislators making these decisions about capital funding requests should be asking city leaders where the money is going to come from to staff, operate and maintain these massive new facilities. St. Paul is already hard-pressed to pay for the cost of operating and maintaining its roads, bridges and recreation facilities.

Having approved the city’s 1 percent sales tax in its 2023 session, legislators should require St. Paul to adopt a resolution estimating the increase in property taxes (or alternative funding) that will be needed, over 20 years, to cover the projected costs of new staff, operations and maintenance for each new project proposal.

This will ensure that legislators are considering the property tax burden being projected onto city taxpayers when they fund these new projects.

Carl Michaud, St. Paul, is a former public works director for Hennepin County. Dan Cornejo, St. Paul, is a former director of Planning and Economic Development for the City of Saint Paul. John Mannillo is a St. Paul real estate developer and current chair of the civic group Saint Paul STRONG.

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