Tammy Hagerty, Sartell
In a community with such a great education foundation, it’s hard to look at the bond and say no. It’s just one meal out at a restaurant a month, right? It will only lengthen your mortgage payments for up to six months on the average home. No big deal. What’s six months? Most residents won’t live in their home for 25 years, which is the length of this bond. But say you are a farmer owning 140 acres and rent another 400 acres from other land owners in this district (landowners rent out their land to cover their land tax). Currently, your taxes on your homestead and acreage are $2,319.39 a year. With the projected increase of $948 a year, the family farm you’ve owned for more than 35 years will now cost you an additional $81,610.75 throughout the next 25 years. This number is strictly school tax from Phase 1 and does not include the 2019 operating levy or the Phases 2 and 3 the school is projecting to ask for in the future. This cost of $81,610 also does not include what you will pay others to rent their land. So with their taxes increasing, land rent will go up as well. With farmers already showing a loss of income for this year, this bond-tax increase will not be good for farmers. Will any farmers be able to survive these additional costs? My answer to that, along with the many farmers of the district, is no. But yet the bond website states the new school will create “greater community partnership opportunities.” For who? Certainly not the agricultural land owners. Our schools send our kids to farm field trips in Litchfield and Elk River, where the kids go to non-working farms and see a few farm animals. If we really want our kids to know what true farming is, go to local farms and show them. If you want to bring them to pet animals, go to a zoo.
Some have said to us farmers we should be happy another school is going up because it will increase their land value so when the farm cannot financially make it due to the tax increases, we can sell for a higher value. So farmers are expected to just quit what they have known their entire life and what has been in their family for generations? Get rid of everything they have worked so hard for? I’ve also heard farms don’t belong in the middle of the city. As a child, I remember most of Sartell being farmland and a good portion of it still is being farmed. Last I checked, St. Stephen is not what many would call “city living,” as most of it is farmland. This bond is more than just a school for the district; it’s putting family farms out of business and farmers out of their homes and livelihood. The board needs to re-evaluate its spending costs and look at what is truly needed for our students to be successful. It isn’t the building that makes education great; it’s our teachers. Do we really need an $89.5-million school with an 800-person auditorium and a double-decker gym? At the bond meeting, they said it would only be $15 million less to just add on to the current schools versus building. That’s a huge difference. The school also owns 40 acres in St. Stephen they could sell to help with these costs and collect taxes on it. Sartell also has tax-exempt apartment buildings. How is that fair to those living in the community paying higher school taxes? So I ask you to look beyond a shiny new school and look at the land around you and beyond the City of Sartell. Look at the farms, the families on those farms, the animals and crops. Take a minute and think of what this will do to them. Next time you go to the grocery store, think of where your food is coming from before it gets there. I want to preserve what few farmers we have left. They are the only ones who buy everything at retail costs and sell at wholesale. Think about this for a minute and please consider voting no this time to make the school board re-evaluate what they are doing with our money.