Your local government, in plain English.

My name is Daniel Swenson and I am on the Nowthen City Council. This website is totally separate from the City of Nowthen and is not paid for, maintained, or written by anyone but myself in my own personal capacity. The idea for this website started with just making council meeting agenda packets and minutes readable and searchable. The records on Nowthen's official website are PDFs that are not searchable. I was originally intending to just make it a tool for my own use on the Nowthen City Council so I could more easily search the history of issues over previous councils. After I put all of the records into a searchable database I thought it would also be super useful to residents of the city.

Then I just kept going and put up all the data I could find on the city's website, whether it was old or current budgets, auditor reports, ordinances, or info from Minnesota and Anoka County regarding taxes. I also parsed the records to pull out specific data on roads, city equipment, and vehicles. In a larger city these probably would not be top-level subjects for a city transparency website, but in our little Nowthen, spending on roads and vehicles are by far our largest ticket spending items.

After getting all of this information up on the website I realized it might be useful to explain exactly how property taxes and city budgeting works. As the new guy on the City Council last year I learned a lot of the specifics of property taxes, levies, tax capacity, city budgets, roads, and much more. These are confusing topics that can be hard to wrap your head around, and given their confusing nature, it is easy for residents, elected officials, or city staff to make claims that are nearly unverifiable. To verify them you would need to spend time sorting through financial documents, minutes, county tax records, and more. When you rely on elected officials to give you this information it is always going to be at best biased, and at worst flat out false.

I am a personal injury and work comp attorney by trade and do not have any formal training on finances or taxes. Through study, work, and math, I have nevertheless been able to crack this black box of taxes and spending in our city government. I have tried my hardest to present this information in an objective fashion. Some of the conclusions and assumptions are my own (supported with evidence), but I have tried hard to only make assumptions that are very well supported by the math.

I personally hate it when I have to listen to two politicians making the exact opposite claims about the same data. All I hear is a bunch of bickering and fighting and it makes me tune out and stop caring, because diving into the actual budget and taxes and revenues and spending issues would be a full-time job if I researched everything for myself. So I finished this website from that perspective. The goal here is not to advocate for any one position or direction for the city; it is to enable you as a city resident to look at the numbers and records for yourself and be able to verify what elected officials are telling you. It will enable you to immediately cut through their bullshit and verify the facts for yourself.

There is a lot of math for sure on this website, but I am confident that Nowthen residents are intelligent enough to track it, or to use the tools on this website to get at the answers or information they need. That is it. Transparency is the goal. Hopefully you learn something along the way. My only goal is to enable you as a Nowthen resident to access the data for yourself so that you can reach your own conclusions and hold us elected officials accountable for the garbage that inevitably comes spilling out of our mouths.