Articles

The survey came back with three loud, shared wishes: don’t change Nowthen, fix the roads, and don’t raise taxes. You can have any two of those. You cannot have all three. Here is why, in the city’s own budget.

You’ve heard that development “grows the tax base.” This is the math nobody shows you: how the rate is really set, why a new road almost never pays for itself, and what keeping one 110-acre corner in farm field costs the average Nowthen home.

The council voted 3 to 2 to order a new tandem dump truck and plow instead of rebuilding the city’s 26-year-old Sterling. Here are the real numbers, why a used truck was not the cheap shortcut it sounds like, and why salt, not mileage, retires a plow truck.