Minnesota’s property taxes are rising again.
Last month, I wrote about the latest wave of property tax hikes sweeping across Minnesota. Some recent headlines read:
Sun Post: Robbinsdale sets 6% preliminary tax levy increase for 2027
Park Rapids Enterprise: Hubbard County raises preliminary levy by 10%
Ely Echo: Council sets 4.9% preliminary levy increase for 2027
Sun Sailor: Wayzata sets 6.25% preliminary tax levy increase for 2027
Sun Current: Edina council adopts 6.5% preliminary tax levy increase
Mesabi Tribune: County Board approves 6.25% levy increase
Pioneer Press: St. Paul City Council approves maximum tax levy increase of 6.8%
KSTP: Dakota County moves forward with preliminary tax levy increase of 18.5%
These come after a hike of $1 billion ($164 per person) statewide this year.
As I noted a month ago, one of the most cited reasons for these hikes are the unfunded mandates imposed on local governments by Minnesota’s state government. As former Triton Schools Superintendent Craig Schlichting explained in the Dodge County Independent last February, “An unfunded mandate is any policy or requirement that is created by legislation without sufficient funding to cover the cost of implementation.”
Dakota County
Dakota County’s 18.5% hike stands out of the above list. County Commissioner Joe Atkins explains that “two of the biggest new state-driven costs are Paid Family and Medical Leave and the Minnesota African American Family Preservation and Child Welfare Disproportionality Act. Together, those are adding more than $4 million in county costs.”
We have written extensively about PFML, which was passed into law by the “historic” DFL trifecta in 2023. The Minnesota African American Family Preservation and Child Welfare Disproportionality Act was passed by the trifecta’s second session in 2024. As my colleague Bill Walsh wrote in November 2024:
The new law tips the scales against protecting children in favor of keeping families together, even when the family is the source of abuse. Considered the most radical child-welfare-reform bill in the country, the new law makes it harder to remove “disproportionately represented” children from homes where they may have been neglected or abused, keeping black and minority kids in unsafe environments in the name of racial equity.
Explaining why property tax hikes in Wisconsin are so much lower than in our state, Matt Hilgart of the Association of Minnesota Counties told KSTP that “If Wisconsin was dealing with…the same changes to child protection laws … I would argue there is no way Wisconsin county levies would be at 3 or 4 percent.” “In 2023, the state implemented a new child protection law that impacts 98% of the cases in Dakota County,” County Commissioner Mike Slavik explains. “There is significant ongoing annual costs and the state only gave one time seed money.”
This unambiguously bad law, passed by the DFL trifecta, is now one of the factors driving up Minnesotans’ property taxes and squeezing affordability. To prevent a repeat, our new report “Supplying Hope and Demanding (Real) Affordability: An agenda for Minnesota’s future,” calls for Minnesota’s state government to place a limit on unfunded mandates.
