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Colleges object to street light fee
By: JIM HAMMERAND, Staff Writer
Posted: Friday, November 6, 2009 10:49 pm
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NORTHFIELD — Northfield’s two colleges stand to pay the most under a city proposal to recoup street lighting costs.

Under the initial proposal, St. Olaf College would pay around $24,000 per year on nearly 251 acres of land. Carleton College would pay nearly $20,000 on about 205 acres.

City officials say charging homeowners a flat monthly fee and billing other landowners based on acreage is the simplest way to collect about $227,000 in annual operating costs for lights along city streets.

But the colleges say the fee is unfair and runs counter to the exemptions traditionally granted to non-profit landowners.

Recent proposals would set monthly fees at no less than $2 for homeowners and a greater, per-acre fee, on other properties, including the colleges.

City Administrator Joel Walinski said that schedule is “a very simple method,” and that assessing the true costs of lighting streets per resident, customer, employee or student would be a greatly expensive undertaking for the city. City staff and councilors have met with representatives of both colleges to solicit proposals that are “equitable but not overly burdensome administratively,” he said.

Steve Blodgett, St. Olaf’s marketing and communications director, told the Northfield News this week that his college’s objections are firmly rooted in principle.

“It’s hard to speculate on whether there might be an amenable formula or not. It’s hard to picture one off the top of one’s head if, in fact, one of the issues directly at hand is whether an alternative property tax is appropriate in the first place,” he said.




Though the college sympathetically understands the “financial dilemma” in state aid cuts facing the city, he said, local, state and federal governments have long recognized the greater good nonprofits serve in their communities by exempting them from taxes on property holdings. In an e-mail to City Councilor Rhonda Pownell, Blodgett called the fee a “thinly cloaked back door tax on nonprofits.”

The burden of such a tax would fall mostly on students and their parents, Blodgett said, whose tuition payments generate 70 percent of the school’s revenue.

Carleton College has also objected to the acreage assessment, Vice President and Treasurer Fred Rogers said, but might be more accepting of a different model.

“If the whole city has to help cover the cost of streetlights, I don’t think we’re immune from that. I just think the basis they came up with is very unfair,” he said.

The City Council is considering a few different rates of assessment, but Rogers said it was too early to speculate on what the college would be able to support, or what would happen if no agreement was reached.

The annual fee as preliminarily proposed would represent a fraction of the millions in annual utility bills for Carleton, Rogers said, but it’s still worth fighting for.

“Right now with the budget we have, everything’s a big deal,” he said.

The City Council will discuss the streetlight utility fee Monday night at City Hall as part of a larger look at city utility rates, City Administrator Joel Walinski said.



— Jim Hammerand covers the city. He can be reached at jhammerand@northfieldnews.com or 645-1114.
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Member Opinions:
By: dapa2 on 11/7/09
Yeah there is a simple solution - stop raising fees and other taxes for what property taxes already pay for!

By: maxwell on 11/7/09
Welcome to the new world. Everyone is paying "fees" today that are nothing but thinly disguised taxes. If the colleges are benefitting from city lights, then they should pay for them; just like the rest of us.

By: deacond on 11/7/09
The solution should be for the MN Legislature to rescind the property tax-free status of all private colleges in the state. These economic times require everyone to pay fair share taxes.

By: hidden on 11/7/09
Non-profit or not, anything that fronts city streets shouldn't be exempt from their fair share.

 
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