Information about city spending and taxes

We have all seen competing claims on Facebook about city spending, taxes, staffing, roads, and equipment. The purpose of this memo is to provide the facts on these frequently debated topics. If these issues are going to be discussed, the discussion should be based on the city record and the actual numbers. Every number below comes from the city's own budgets, packets, minutes, and invoices. If I have something wrong, tell me and I will post the correction.

How much of your property tax goes to the city?

The city does not receive the full amount shown on a property tax statement. For a typical Nowthen home, the city receives about 22 to 28 percent of your total property tax payment, depending on your school district. The remainder goes to Anoka County, the school district, and metro districts.

The average Nowthen homestead has an estimated market value of about $480,000. At the 2026 certified rate, the city tax on that home is about $1,135 per year.

Why has the city levy increased?

The levy is the total amount the city collects through property taxes each year. The levy increased over the last decade, but the city tax rate was held relatively low because property values also increased over the same period. During that period, the city used money from its general fund balance and one-time federal CARES and ARPA funds to pay ongoing expenses. Staff reports that federal funds also paid for office improvements and the Arvig internet connection. Those sources cannot be used twice. When they are spent, ongoing expenses have to be paid through the annual levy again.

Debt payments were also delayed. The city collected no levy for the 2019A road bond in 2023 and 2024 in order to keep the levy for those years lower, even though the bond payments still came due. The total debt levy was $135,000 in 2023 and $439,177 in 2026. Much of the 2026 levy increase came from restoring debt payments, not from adding a new city program.

Many neighboring cities raised their levies in smaller annual steps over this same period. Nowthen relied more heavily on reserves, one-time funds, and delayed work. When those resources ran out, several years of costs reached the budget at the same time.

The proposed 2027 levy in the August 24, 2026 budget packet is $2,563,197, an increase of $230,410, or 9.9 percent. All of that increase is in the general fund. The debt levy stays flat at $439,177. The city's financial consultant put the city-only increase on an average Nowthen home at about $7.60 a month.

Why planning matters and the cost of waiting

Good financial management requires the city to look several years ahead. Roads, trucks, fire equipment, buildings, and employees are all predictable needs. The exact date may change, but the need does not disappear. When the city plans ahead, it can compare options, obtain bids, choose when to buy, and save money over time. Some recent examples.

• Staff research identified a discount for prepaying the fire rescue truck chassis, which saved $20,564. Waiting a few months longer would have lost that discount.
• The plow truck was already scheduled for replacement in 2027 under the approved Capital Improvement Plan. Staff determined that placing the purchase order in 2026, ahead of an emissions rule taking effect for 2027, would avoid a price increase the vendor estimated at $15,000 on the chassis. Placing the order required no payment in 2026, and delivery is still scheduled for the 2027 plow season. This was a timing catch by staff that cost the city nothing to act on.
• A written Capital Improvement Plan and Equipment Replacement Plan now identifies upcoming needs and gives the city time to prepare for them.

Without a plan, the city has fewer choices. When a frontline machine the city depends on fails, it has to be repaired immediately regardless of cost. A replacement may have to be bought from whatever is available at that moment. The city also loses the ability to wait for better market conditions or to build cash reserves before the purchase.

The same principle applies to roads. Jasper Street was priced at $390,960 in 2019 for reclaiming, which is the mid-level repair. That project was postponed and never completed. By 2023 the engineer estimated $1.6 million for similar work. The capital plan now carries a full reconstruction in 2028 at $1,826,800, about 4.7 times the 2019 price. The city also has a federal grant application pending for Jasper Street.

Inflation explains part of that increase. Part of it is that the road moved from reclaiming to full reconstruction, which is the most expensive treatment there is. Waiting moved the road into a costlier category of work, and the bill was waiting there when the city finally got to it.

Planning does not prevent every emergency. It does reduce the number of predictable needs that become emergencies. It is the only practical way to manage a city budget responsibly over time.

Equipment replacement

Public works has kept several machines operating beyond their expected service life. Much of the fleet was bought used, so some machines were already near the end of their useful life when the city acquired them. Breakdowns take employees away from road and maintenance work while they diagnose failures, locate parts, and repair outdated equipment. Transfers into the equipment fund stopped in 2023, and the account was nearly empty by 2024.

Part of the reason the city is in a period where several equipment purchases need to be made has to do with timing and a little Nowthen history. Burns Township grew quickly in the early 2000s with new housing developments and new road that came along with those developments. The city bought equipment at that time to serve that growth. The expected service life of that generation of equipment is now coming due, and it is coming due together. The 2000 Sterling plow truck was replaced in 2024. The 2007 Sterling is slated for replacement in 2027. The 2006 eXmark mower is slated for 2027, and the 2006 John Deere tractor is slated for 2031 at the end of a 25 year service life. That is not a spending spree. It is one generation of equipment aging out on schedule.

The council adopted a written Capital Improvement Plan and Equipment Replacement Plan on May 13, 2025. It adopted an updated 2027 through 2031 plan on June 9, 2026.

The goal is to put money into the equipment fund every year so the city can eventually pay cash instead of borrowing for equipment. The city is not there yet. Equipment purchases still require bonding, and the long-term plan is to end that practice and buy from savings instead. That creates a transition period, and current residents are at the beginning of that transition period. The city is still paying off bonds for equipment bought in the past while also starting to set aside money for equipment it will need in the future. This transition period is unavoidable if we ever want to stop borrowing money to cover purchases. That is certainly an option, but bonding for every future purchase would cost more over time.

I would encourage you to watch the August 24, 2026 workshop. In that meeting I questioned the financial consultant about longer term planning and when bonding will end, and she walked the council through a longer projection than the adopted five-year plan. In that projection, the last equipment bond is sold in 2032 and the last road bond in 2043. Those are projections, not promises. They show what the transition looks like if the levy transfers into the capital funds actually happen while the old bonds are still being paid.

Pay steps, employee turnover, and employee retention

In 2026 the council adopted a step pay program with published wage steps and training opportunities for employees. It took effect on July 1, 2026. The purpose of this program is to make employee costs predictable and to improve recruitment and retention.

Criticism of this new step pay program often includes arguments about how Nowthen is not comparable to a city like Ramsey, or Andover, or Elk River, and that setting our wages in lockstep with those cities is therefore not logical. This is not how the market works. Our competition for employees are the cities and municipalities surrounding us. Not some far off city that perfectly matches our profile for population, services, and taxing. Even if the cities around us are much bigger with different service and tax profiles, they are our competition. It is fair to point out that we are not Ramsey, but the result of that comparison is that we do not need as many employees as Ramsey does, because we are smaller. That size comparison does not mean that we somehow get to pay our employees less with no consequences. If we choose to underpay our employees we will not recruit the best candidates, will not retain employees after we train them, and we will continue to see employee turnover at higher rates than necessary.

Why would a person with relevant experience apply for a job with Nowthen that has an under market salary when they could go work the same job less than 10 miles away making the market rate for that position? They won't. The result of underpaying employees because we are a small city would be to continuously hire inexperienced people who have no other options, spend time and money training those new employees, then lose those employees to surrounding cities once their training and experience is sufficient to obtain a job in one of those bigger cities. We would get all the cost and hassle of hiring and training inexperienced employees, and none of the benefit of keeping them once they are trained and experienced.

This notion is not in dispute, that employee turnover costs money. There is study after study showing this. Why rely on studies though when we have real examples in our recent past as a city. Twice in the last decade the city has learned the cost of turnover. First in 2017 and 2018 when we lost our city clerk and deputy clerk. And then again in 2021 when the entire city staff quit all at once. I am not giving these examples to relitigate the past, but to show actual cost to the city from employee turnover.

From 2021 through May 2024, city office positions were filled ten times and the administrator position was filled twice. Documented turnover costs since November 2021 total $276,590.27, mostly tied directly to the mass quitting itself in 2021.

• Interim city administrator costs were $182,412.
• Legal costs connected with employee departures were $64,782.50.
• Recruitment costs were $29,395.77.

That total does not include staff time, retraining, lost knowledge, or missed reporting.

Employee retention pays for itself in other ways as well. Employees who stay long enough to learn the job well begin to spot inefficiencies, find grants, and identify savings that a rotating staff never sees. The next section is a list of what experienced staff found and acted on.

Where the city has reduced costs

Every dollar below was found by a City of Nowthen employee. Not by me, and not by the council. What a council can do is pay enough to recruit good employees, set fair pay ranges to encourage employees to stick around, ensure those employees are trained well, let them work without being second-guessed, and follow through when they bring something forward. That is the culture Mayor Hybben has cultivated, and the results below come from that culture and from our excellent and knowledgeable staff. Some of these are expense reductions. Others are grants, revenue, or price increases that were avoided by deciding early.

The recurring benefit is about $25,972 a year. Of that, $15,972 is the Anoka County recycling payment. Staff tracked where recycle center users live, the county verified that about 32 percent live outside Nowthen, and the county now pays its share every year to Nowthen as a recurring line of new revenue. It is recalculated annually, so the exact amount will move around. Staff reported at the August 24 workshop that the 2027 payment is again about $16,000. The other $10,000 is a permit the city no longer has to administer, and that figure is conservative. Getting out of that permit required knowledge of the permit, understanding of the system, research, application, and follow through. The remaining items total about $158,000 in one-time savings, avoided costs, grants, and revenue.

The culvert job is worth a closer look, because it shows how these pieces connect. The city could only do that work in-house because it had hired a public works employee with the skill to do it, and it could only recruit that person after raising the pay scale for the position to attract candidates, like him, with a high level of experience and training. The wage decision produced the savings.

Other completed and ongoing work

These items do not all carry a single verified dollar figure.

• Ordinances are being updated to reduce unnecessary regulation and make fewer property projects require a variance.
• Public works replaced culverts in-house instead of hiring a contractor. The verified figure for the Marble Street job is in the chart above.
• City lighting is being replaced with LED fixtures to reduce energy use.
• Twin Lakes Park received replacement boat launch docks and floats.
• The new fire rescue truck includes a pump so it can serve more than one purpose.
• Paper files are being digitized, and appropriate historical records are being provided to the historical society.
• The existing server was rebuilt instead of replaced, and failing cameras were reconfigured to extend their use.
• Firefighters are receiving EMT and officer training.
• Public works is using a higher-clay gravel mix intended to hold road material together longer.
• Street signs are being replaced one quarter of the city at a time to finally come into compliance with state regulations for our street signs.
• A storm warning siren is budgeted for Twin Lakes Park but has not yet been installed.

Other frequently discussed topics

Fire department well

Nowthen does not have municipal water or sewer. A fire department well would not create either system. Because the well would pump more than 10,000 gallons on a working fire, it requires a water appropriation permit from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, and the DNR has to sign off on the well design before it can even be drilled. That permit authorizes one purpose: filling fire department tankers.

Using the water for anything else would require an entirely new permit application, and building a municipal water system on top of it would also require Department of Health approval of a public water supply and a Met Council water supply plan. None of that is proposed, and none of it could happen quietly. Your well at home is exempt from DNR permitting because it serves one household. This well is not, and that is what keeps it locked to fire use.

The department currently gets water from neighboring cities or from a smaller well that takes about 30 minutes to fill one tanker. The city has never been charged for those filling services by other cities. I would not count on that generosity lasting forever. Neighboring cities planned, saved, and paid for their own water sources. If Nowthen permanently defers this project with the stated plan of relying on other cities' water, we are asking their residents to keep subsidizing a cost we declined to plan for ourselves. That is not a stable plan, and it is not a fair one.

Did recent council spending cause the increase to our levy?

The 2025 and 2026 councils approved spending on equipment, staff, and long-delayed improvements. That spending is real and it is visible in the budget. It is not the whole explanation. The same budgets had to absorb the return of deferred debt payments, the end of one-time federal aid, the loss of the fund balance that had been covering operations, and projects that became more expensive while they waited.

It would have been politically easier for this council to continue with delayed and deferred projects and equipment purchases, but it would have been fiscally irresponsible and would only further compound the catch-up required of some future council and resident taxpayers.

Road funding

The city's long-range model uses about $1 million per year as a future planning target. That is not the amount currently spent each year. It is a target for maintaining roughly 59 miles of city road, about 26 of them gravel. Delaying this necessary spending does not save money over time. It might save money today, but the cost continues to compound, not just from inflation, but also from the further deterioration of our roads to the point where they require more costly fixes. Delaying road spending objectively shortens the life span of our roads and increases the cost to residents of maintaining the road system.

Work that remains

Staff's current list includes the following.

• Maintain and resurface the Twin Lakes parking lot before the existing asphalt deteriorates further.
• Replace pavilion doors and two pavilion roofs.
• Replace failing playground equipment and continue maintaining park trails and buildings. Staff reports that replacing the playground is optional, but fixing or removing the broken pieces is not.
• Repair the maintenance and office building roof.
• Continue work on the Historic Town Hall. Staff reports that prior patching did not address its insulation and other underlying needs, and that its basement has had dampness and mold problems.
• Add air movement equipment in the public works shop.
• Repair or replace the fire station apron. Public works reported on August 24 that water is running toward the building slab.
• Begin capital savings for a future fire station. Staff reports that the current building does not meet the standard for a fire station and is vulnerable to severe weather.
• Continue bringing gravel to the gravel roads and maintaining or replacing the paved ones.
• Replace park gates so vehicles cannot drive onto walking paths.
• Determine how many stormwater ponds the city is required to maintain. Staff reports this work has not been done and has not been budgeted.

The budget, and the talk of cutting it

You have heard, and will continue to hear, that the answer to a rising levy is fiscal responsibility, fiscal conservatism, “needs” versus “wants,” or some other variation of these surface-deep slogans. What you never hear is those words put into action, where the speaker identifies the supposed “wants,” or shows what this supposed fiscal responsibility looks like applied to our actual budget. City staff report that not a single resident or business owner has contacted the city with a specific budget suggestion.

Our budget is as lean as it can get. Nearly every statistic about our budget shows it. Nowthen's city tax rate is second lowest of Anoka County's 20 cities. The only city with a lower rate in Anoka County achieves it with commercial taxes on businesses located along Highway 65. We have no such commercial corridor in our city, nor do we want one. Our road spending per mile and our fire spending per resident and per square mile sit at or near the bottom of the cities around us. There is nowhere left to cut that does not cut into roads, equipment, safety, or people.

Our growing levy is not evidence of runaway spending. It is evidence of three things happening at the same time. Costs rose with inflation. The yearly payments on each bond the city sold in 2019, 2021, and 2025 came onto the tax bill. And spending that had been delayed or deferred had to be paid for later, at a higher price.

Look at our budget in the chart below. Each spending category keeps the same color every year so you can follow it from left to right. The numbers through 2025 are actual spending. 2026 is the adopted budget and 2027 is the August 24 proposed budget. The debt band is the debt service levy, which is the tax collected for bond payments, not a department. Our proposed levy for 2027 is about $2.6 million, while the bars add up to about $3 million. That $0.4 million difference is made up by revenue from sources other than the levy, in case you are wondering why these numbers do not quite match other numbers you might look at elsewhere. Road construction and major equipment purchases sit in separate capital funds and are not inside these bars.

Administration

The largest category in my chart is administration. I have expanded this category beyond how it is listed in the agenda packets, if you have had the chance to look at those. In this chart it rolls up nine general fund departments so the year-to-year change is readable. The packet lists them separately, and here is what the 2027 proposed rollup contains.

Office administration is the actual city office line. It covers the clerk, deputy clerk, operations specialist, front desk, and the supplies, training, benefits, website, and office equipment that keep the office running. It is proposed at $397,195 for 2027, up $44,425 from 2026.

The rest of the band is not office payroll. Building inspection is a contracted service. Legal is the civil attorney for city business and the prosecuting attorney who enforces our laws. Finance and assessing is the legally required audit, accounting, and assessing. General government and buildings is utilities, maintenance, animal control, and similar shared costs. Planning and zoning is the planning contract. Mayor and council, elections, and the watershed assessment are the remaining pieces.

This category has held in a fairly narrow range since 2022. It peaked at about $1.06 million in 2024, fell about $100,000 in 2025, and is proposed at about $986,000 for 2027, which is below both 2024 and 2026.

Public works and roads

The next category is public works and roads. It is the public works department plus the engineering line, and it is operating money for the roads, not the separate road construction fund that pays for full rebuilds. It covers the salaries of our public works employees for time spent on roads rather than in the parks, training, supplies and equipment for those employees to maintain our roads (oil, fuel, tires, parts, and everything else required by a department that operates and maintains a grader, tractors, plows, and every other piece of equipment this city owns), street signs, repair costs, crack filling and patch work, winter salt and sand, gravel, and chloride for the gravel roads. All of this money goes directly into the roads you drive on.

There are no “wants” in this category, unless you consider good roads a “want” and not a “need.” I think we can all agree our roads are in substandard condition. That is not evidence of money being wasted just because the roads are still rough. It is evidence that every last dollar spent in this category is absolutely necessary and that this category above all others needs more money rather than less.

If you truly think there are “wants” inflating this category, I invite you to open the 2027 public works pages in the budget packet and identify the line items that are higher than they need to be. If you need more information on what each line is and why it is needed, watch our budget workshop meetings on YouTube, where our actual public works employees explain what those lines are spent on and why that amount is necessary for 2027.

Sheriff contract

The next category is the sheriff contract, and it cannot be trimmed. The city has asked Anoka County whether it can reduce the number of contracted deputy hours that serve as our city police force and has been told it cannot. The city has talked with surrounding cities about covering Nowthen for less than the county contract. It would be much more expensive. The city has also priced standing up its own police force. That was far more expensive still. The decision on this category is all or nothing. Either we have contracted police coverage, or we do not.

If we eliminated this category, our only coverage would be Anoka County emergency response from wherever the nearest deputy happens to be. If you called 911, the nearest deputy might be in Andover, or Anoka, or further. That is certainly an option, but not a good one, and it comes at the cost of objectively slower emergency response. You might think you are fine with that because you have never had to call 911 in an emergency. You will feel differently if you need to and it takes 25 minutes for the first deputy to arrive.

There is some criticism about our deputies doing what looks like noncritical work such as code enforcement. That criticism is usually tied to the idea that we could save money if we did not have deputies doing work that does not seem to require a badge and a gun. That is looking at it backwards. We are not paying extra in the sheriff contract so a deputy can handle code complaints. We already have to pay for those hours. Having a deputy spend some of them on code enforcement, instead of sitting on Viking Boulevard with a radar gun, is the city getting the most out of a contract it has to pay for either way.

Fire department

There is often debate about going back to having another city cover our fire needs and paying a contract price. That removes fire spending from our control and hands us an invoice instead. We did that for a long time. The decision was made to stand up our own department in 2021, and right or wrong, it is the road we are on now.

Chief Miller gave the council a comparison of neighboring paid-on-call departments at the August 24, 2026 budget workshop. It compares Nowthen against Linwood, Oak Grove, the Rum River Fire District, Ham Lake, East Bethel, Ramsey, and Andover. Those are the departments that border us or run the same paid-on-call model we do. Here is his table, using each department's 2026 budget and 2020 census population.

Three things stand out.

• Nowthen has the lowest total fire budget in the group, $327,700. The next lowest, Linwood, spends $82,830 more. Oak Grove spends more than double.
• Per resident, Nowthen is at $72.24. Every department except Ham Lake spends more per person, and Ham Lake only comes in lower because it spreads its budget across 16,464 people. That $72.24 uses the 2020 census count. The state's current estimate of 4,813 residents would put it under $70.
• Per square mile, Nowthen is at $9,736. That is the lowest in the group by a wide margin. Linwood is next at $12,273, and everyone else is at least double what we spend.

The square mile number is the one that matters most for a rural department. A fire truck costs the same whether it protects 4,500 people or 16,000. So does the station, the water supply, the turnout gear, the radios, the training hours, and the minimum crew you need to roll on a call. Those costs are set by geography and by the job, not by headcount. The cleanest comparison in the table is Linwood, Oak Grove, and Nowthen, because all three protect about 34 square miles. Linwood budgets $410,530 to do it. Oak Grove budgets $689,163. Nowthen budgets $327,700.

The proposed 2027 fire budget is $387,765, up $60,065 from the 2026 number in the table. Most of that is paying and training firefighters. Part-time earnings go up $21,900 with our new hires, overtime $11,800, training $10,000, uniforms $5,000, and pension contributions about $9,000. Even at the 2027 figure Nowthen stays the lowest total and the lowest per square mile in this group, and every one of these departments will have a 2027 increase of its own.

The department also brings money back in. Chief Miller reports that the department receives direct training reimbursement payments from the Minnesota Board of Firefighter Training and Education for educating our personnel. Those payments run between $10,000 and $20,000 per year depending on what is submitted for reimbursement, and the department has received $12,256 so far in 2026.

The chief also noted that when Nowthen split from Ramsey, Ramsey's price for administration alone was about $165,000, before payroll, station, or equipment. We don't want that part of the bill back. We do it better and for less money under Chief Miller.

By every measure he presented, our Chief is building this department for the least money possible. And not just some minimally acceptable department. Nowthen is gaining a reputation for being a lean and exceptionally well-run department under Chief Miller. I encourage you to watch his presentation at our August 24 workshop meeting on YouTube before treating a single dollar total as proof the department is oversized. If you come away from it and still think we are overspending, I welcome your ideas. Merely complaining about a dollar amount without understanding that dollar's need or its alternatives is not budget work. It is empty criticism.

Debt service

The debt band in the chart is the property tax levy collected for the bonds the city sold in 2019, 2021, and 2025, which paid for roads and equipment. It is the levy, not the bond payment. The two are not the same, and the gap between them is where part of the 2026 jump came from.

In September 2023 the council zeroed out the levy for the 2019A road bond for 2023 and 2024 to keep those years' levies lower. The stated plan was to push that amount, about $65,000 a year, out onto 2025, 2026, and 2027 taxpayers. The bond payments came due anyway. The bond fund paid them out of its own reserve and drew that cushion down by about $153,000 in two years. The catch-up on the levy line never really happened. The 2019A levy came back at only $25,775 in 2025, then about $70,600 in 2026 and $71,915 proposed for 2027, a few thousand dollars a year above where it sat before the debt service break. What actually refilled the fund was a $105,000 transfer out of the general fund in the 2026 budget. That is levy money too. It just shows up in the operating levy instead of the debt band.

So the 2023 and 2024 debt levy break saved taxpayers about $130,000 across 2023 and 2024, and the bill came back in 2026 as a $105,000 lump plus a permanently higher 2019A levy through 2030. Nothing was saved. It was moved, and it was moved to us.

The city is legally obligated to make these payments. It is unavoidable. You may criticize the original need for the bonds, but they were sold, the city spent the money, and these are payments that absolutely have to be made. The city's bonds run roughly ten years. Additional bonds are still planned for equipment and roads, so this category will keep rising before it starts to fall. Once the city stops bonding, this band declines every time a bond is paid off and eventually hits zero when the last bond is gone. That is not some impossible fantasy like the federal government ever paying off its $40 trillion debt. It is part of our current budget plan. The consultant's August 24 projection puts the last equipment bond in 2032 and the last road bond in 2043.

This only happens if we contribute money to our capital funds from the levy each year while we keep paying down the bonds for past purchases. That is what fiscal responsibility and planning actually look like. Winging it and refusing to spend, or even worse, being fine with spending but only through bonds, never gets us to a place where we stop borrowing and paying interest.

Parks

The final category is parks. For 2027 it includes park operating costs plus the new Community Events department. This is the easiest category to label a “want,” but as it stands it is a “need.” The city owns and operates park land, and Nowthen residents use it. Either we maintain it and keep it usable, or we stop maintaining it and it becomes overgrown land. If you truly feel parks spending should be eliminated, that means selling the park land, probably to developers, because who else buys park land. There is no in between, unless you are advocating for the city owning and just sitting on large overgrown tracts of land.

The money we spend on parks is as minimal as it can get. It covers the ball fields, picnic and bathroom buildings, playgrounds, beach, fishing pier, disc golf course, and other park amenities. If you have been in our parks, you know these items do not receive excessive spending. Bring your kid to any of our playgrounds. They are basic playgrounds, not giant castle structures. Our bathrooms are the sort you only use if you cannot hold it until you get home. Like the roads, the fact that these amenities are not pristine is not evidence that money is being wasted. It is evidence that this category is probably too low and every dollar is being stretched as far as it goes.

Wants, needs, and what real financial planning looks like

We as a council look at each of these categories every year, broken down far more granularly than my chart above. The agenda packets for our budget workshops and the past budgets on the city website have the line-item detail. In those workshops we go through the budget line by line with the staff who spend it.

There are a few legitimate “wants.” The $2,000 we contribute to the weekly Farmers Market, most of which comes back to the city through vendor fees. The $3,000 we contribute to the Nowthen Heritage Festival. Together with related marketing and overtime, those sit in the new $7,575 Community Events department. The general fund also carries a $10,000 contingency. We also created a new sort of contingency fund in the elections budget for a special election, so that in the future a special election does not turn into an unbudgeted spending question and is just a matter of using those budgeted funds. Cutting every one of those saves a few thousand dollars on a budget that spends about $3 million a year. A rounding error. I think most Nowthen residents would agree that the couple of bucks spent on these “wants” is acceptable.

All other spending is on “needs.” For those lines, typically the only way to reduce them is through a reduction in services, a reduction in maintenance, or a delay in necessary spending. Delaying and deferring spending is not the answer. It is a temporary solution to a permanent problem, and it only makes the problem more expensive. For a resident who is only living in Nowthen temporarily before moving on, delay is a legitimate savings. For those of us who will live here the rest of our lives, delay only costs more.

This whole memo can be summarized in one idea. Spend $1 now to avoid spending $5 tomorrow.

If you only look at the $1 spent today and aim all your criticism at that dollar, while ignoring the $5 that will have to be spent tomorrow if we do not spend the $1 today, you are missing almost the entire point of budgeting and planning.

So when you hear “wants versus needs,” or hear that spending is out of control, ask that person what their plan actually is beyond the buzzwords. Ask them, “In your plan, do we ever stop bonding, and if so, how do we get there?” Or better and more direct, “If you think this budget can be reduced, can you identify the specific reductions and explain how they actually save money rather than just delay spending on roads, equipment, or other necessary services?”

If you ask those questions and get well thought out answers that include long-term planning, please share them with me. I would love to respond to actual plans and consider alternatives. But only if they are based in reality and include an understanding of alternatives and consequences. If the answers stay focused on the spending alone, with no consideration of what it costs to not spend, that is complaining, not budget planning.

Dan Swenson, Nowthen City Council. Originally distributed as a memo in August 2026. See the city budget for the budget lines behind these categories.