Cut the levy: you find the cuts
Try to balance the budget yourself. The Sheriff contract and debt service are locked, because the city cannot realistically cut them.
Runs on the adopted payable-2026 budget: the local levy of $2,179,043 over $9,197,371 of tax capacity, the 23.69% city rate. Every result is a scale comparison with its assumptions attached, not a forecast or a recommendation.
Target: remove $233,279 from the 2026 budget. Choose how deep to cut each category below. Only about $1,977,790 of the budget is realistically on the table once the locked items are set aside.
Effectively fixed. Policing is a contract with the Anoka County Sheriff; the city cannot simply pay less for it. The alternatives, contracting with another city’s police department or starting a Nowthen department, would cost more, not less.
Legally owed. Bond payments are a contractual obligation; skipping them is default.
- A dollar of spending cut is treated as a dollar off the levy. In practice the budget is bigger than the levy because permits, fees, and other revenue cover part of it. At the margin, cuts and levy move together.
- Category totals are the adopted budget figures from the budget book, parsed deterministically and approved in admin review.
- Percent changes are measured against the certified levy. The rate effect applies the dollar change to the locally raised portion, because the fiscal-disparities distribution is set by the metro program, not the annual levy vote.
- For average-home and equivalent-home examples this page uses the official payable-2025 Department of Revenue homestead aggregate as a proxy ($6,555,471 of residential homestead tax capacity across 1,369 homesteads, about $4,789 each) applied to the payable-2026 levy and tax base. Treat it as a scale proxy, not a payable-2026 parcel count.