Fair / 59° F
Ice arena sales tax passes [UPDATED]
Published 11:25am Wednesday, July 20, 2011 Updated 11:54am Wednesday, July 20, 2011Fergus Falls’ half-cent ice arena sales tax was in the omnibus tax bill passed by the state Legislature during its Tuesday and Wednesday special session.
No more than $6.6 million to pay for the arena can be raised from the tax.
The tax is legally required to stop as soon as it is determined that that amount has been raised.
Any tax money collected in between the time that the maximum amount for the arena is raised and the time the tax ends can be placed in the general fund.
The tax is expected to last about four and a half years.
Tags: ice arena, State Capitol
Big whoopie? Now the swimming park emporium folks can start squeezing the five tax and spend members of the City Council for 10 or $12 million for their efforts to outdo the Wisconsin Dells parks. Get ready for round two of whiny parents and grandparents coming before the council squealing how unfair it is of the city to only build a hockey arena, but short change the children who want a free place to swim.
Well, if there are enough people who want it, then they should build a swimming park (that’s how things work in a democracy). Besides, complaining about other people complaining doesn’t help your case, it just makes you look petty.
I guess Nornes, Murdock, and Hoffman are happy about raising taxes. Where is republican in them.
One of the beauties of living in a democratic republic is ordinary citizens can, if in the majority, vote to increase their taxes for something they believe is worth while. And if, our elected officials concur with the majority, the wishes of the citizens can come true. Sometimes a minority speaks loudly and the “can gets kicked down the road’ but sometimes democracy works.
You might call that a democracy, but the reason the majority voted for the sales tax( an increase in taxes) is only because they didn’t want to see their property taxes go up again. As a democracy the majority of voters couldn’t vote on whether the arena should be built or not. What’s next?
Hmm…another psychic who knows what motivates “other people”…amazing.
What would have been democratic would have been if the citizens had been given the chance to say we don’t need this…. Thus eliminating the tax that is only going to have more people shopping out of town. It is a shameful thing this council has done
What our Councilmen and women fail to forget or fail to acknowledge is that They are supposed to be representatives of the People, so that we the taxpayers don’t have to be involved in every single vote. They are supposed to represent their constiuents. What they blatantly did was go against every ethical fiber of our system in that they openly said “we passed this project because we knew it would fail if put to a vote” This in of itself shows that they are not doing their jobs, if they know there was so many people against it, their duty, their job as councilmen and women would have been to represent their constiutents not a special interest group.
Whats done is done. But I say this with caution. After the council refused to listen to the taxpayers on the Bigwood Event Center, and Now the Arena. We very much have a Rogue, and Vigilante City Council. If we do not remove some of these people and get the right people in place this city will tax itself to death, and it won’t keep the young people here, because people like me, and my wife and our children, will be the first of many young famlies to move.
Now please hockey moms and hockey parents come to the rescue and try to make sense of all this nonsense and make yourself look foolish.
Please refresh my memory about the Bigwood Event Center and how it came to be. Was it pushed through by the council like the arena?
That doesn’t make any sense at all. Just because you lable something as “X” doesn’t mean that it actually is “X”.
You’re numbers don’t add up either. If 1000 people signed the petition, and there are 9834 people aged 20 and over http://fergusfalls.areaconnect.com/statistics.htm then those opposed represent 10.16%. So, using your percentages, if 75% approve, and 10% disapprove, then 15% seem to be indifferent. Given this, it’s obviously the case that not passing this would be closer to a “Rogue, and Vigilante City Council” (since they wouldn’t be representing 75% of their consituents. Just because you (or a small percentage of the popultion) doesn’t agree with something doesn’t make it wrong – if it did, then we really would be talking about a dictatorship.
P.Wolf, either you were not living here when we raised the petitions (there were two) to inhibit the mad rush by the council to cram this arena through, or you are dissembling and attempting to re-write the sequence of events by presenting some fallacious argument that only an insignificant minority opposed the arena. When we began to circulate the first petition, it was early in December, raw cold, people distracted or pre-occupied with the run up to Christmas. We only had to gather ( I was one of the people circulating the petition) a certain number of signatures to qualify the petition as legitimate to be presented to the council. We gathered about 10% more signatures than were needed in a bit over a week. The council rejected our petition, but in accordance with the City Charter they were obligated to then schedule a city wide referendum to give the voters a chance to override the council action. Enter the Gang of Five (who, incidentally, some of the people who follow this blog, suspect you of being a member) several “progressive” spenders and parents of hockey players or children or fronts for the Hockey association and arena supporters. They got the pro bono services of two “progressive” attorneys to challenge the petition in court. The city attorney nor the city clerk gave any warning that a hearing would be held. The lawyers selected a tame judge to hear the case. None of the sponsors or signators of the petition were notified of the hearing so they could come and be heard. The city attorney rolled over big time and stuck his thumb in the eyes of the petitioners’ right to be heard. Result was a ruling by the judge that the referendum could not be held since the Gang of Five argued that sometime, someone in the distant future might object to an outcome they did not favor. Might object is reason to quash a legal petition?
In the second petition, we gathered even more signatures than the first time, in FOUR DAYS. For days after we presented the petitions, people were looking us up ,wanting to sign the petition, even after it was being submitted to the council. Council again rejected the petition, court again held an unannounced hearing – same result, tame judge rules in favor of the City council to deny the voters the referendum they were guaranteed in the City Charter.
But, the pressure was now on the council. One member announced he would not stand for reelection (it is safe to conjecture that he would have been creamed). Another incumbent was defeated, and one squeezed out a one vote majority in a three way vote(if memory serves me right he got less than 40% of the vote,but I may be wrong on the tally) . The one incumbent who voted against the councils actions, Randy Synstelien, was handily reelected. And we are eagerly awaiting a go at the other four incumbent tax and spend members in 2012. Combined with the three sensible members now on the council, the new council memebers from 2012 election will be a restraining force on out of control spending. Legal trickery thwarted the will of the people, but the tricksters will be turned out of office at the next go around.
First lets talk REGISTERED VOTERS. as not all voters within this city are registered and it takes actual registered voters signatures to get anything done in this city.
Second, I said that there was X signed in a very short time. So think about it, if you spend more time with people, you are going to get more people to sign. here again, many people wanted to sign, but you must be a registered voter in order for the city to even care what you think when it regards to a petition.
Third, You have no grounds for an argument, you have lost this fight in public opinion long before it starts. Save your breath.
Perfectly acceptable, so there are 5599 registered voters in Fergus Falls http://electionresults.sos.state.mn.us/20101102/PrecRptByCounty.asp?rq=56OTTER%20TAIL&M=CTY&CtyCd=56&CtyNm=OTTER+TAIL
But 1000 people opposing the measure means that’s still only 17.86% and that’s still 1799 short of 50%. It reduces the percentage of “indifferent” people to about 8% (given your numbers, and I belong in that group even though I don’t live within the city limits of Fergus, but will be paying the extra sales tax). It’s clearly not the case that “eventually” there would be enough signatures, and you haven’t given me any reason to think that with months to get signatures that the petition would actually get that many. And if that is the case, then given the 75% you quoted, it’s obviously the case that those who wanted the arena have already won the public opinion battle. A “loud” opposition doesn’t mean they are right, it just means they are loud.
The City council members did say that the reason why they didn’t come to the voters in a referendum was because they knew that it would fail.
Come on, this above all else says what they did was wrong. Pretty sure that means they believe that the majority of the voters did not want this or did not want how this was going to be paid for.
Plain and Simple. YOU ARE WRONG. Call it what you want, they shoved that arena down our throats like a dictatorship.
and once again, registered voters, remember when it comes to the city they care nothing except “registered voters”