ST. GEORGE — After months of budget talks, the St. George City Council appeared to be on the verge of passing its first property tax increase in 35 years.
Designed to fund public safety for the next five years as part of the “Safe St. George” initiative, the tax hike was shot down in a 4-1 vote in August after a large crowd of citizens spoke against it.
When St. George Mayor Michele Randall heard the vote count that evening, she said she immediately felt disappointment.
“I saw defeat on the faces of many of our public safety personnel that had shown up in support of the property tax increase,” she said in a recent interview with St. George News. “As a city government, I think it’s negligent to have kicked the can down the road for that long, knowing that the city’s budget team was as conservative as possible.”
Randall and at least one other elected official, along with many city staff leaders, had envisioned this as a prime fiscal opportunity to bolster police salaries as St. George experiences explosive growth. But faced with inflation and debates about the proper role of government, other elected officials backed off the proposed property tax increase and opted to cut from the city’s existing parks budget to make up a small portion of the difference.
So while the city’s public safety departments will receive the funding they need this year, at an estimated cost of $90 million, $23 million of which was to be paid for by the tax hike, the fate of the five-year public safety plan remains uncertain.
The ripple effects of this vote and the divergent funding path officials opted to take have left unanswered questions for the future of the city as it continues to grow faster than any other place in the nation.
With growth, crime climbs
“This is an abnormally slow Friday night,” St. George Police Sgt. Travis Willinger said as he turned left onto 1000 East from 100 South. A 15-year veteran of the department, Willinger said he’s focused on the officers who make up his team.
St. George News recently joined the sergeant on a ride-along in his patrol cruiser in order to see first-hand the realities of policing America’s fastest-growing city.
“We begin each day with a briefing,” Willinger explained, “which can include training, trends and active searches for suspects. The number of serious crimes we’ve been seeing is on the rise. Fentanyl has exploded onto the scene. Vehicle thefts are spiking, especially at trailheads and parks.”
Because of that, Willinger said that hiring more police officers will be key to curbing crime before it gets a foothold.
“Right now, we’re stretched pretty thin,” he said. “I can tell when my officers are burned out, because they stop accepting extra assignments, like the fun-run that’s happening in downtown right now.”
Some officers are vocal about their needs, Willinger said, but there are others who don’t let on.
“They work every extra shift I ask them to,” he said. “They quietly run themselves into the ground. The only way we’d know if they’re burned out is by speaking to their spouses.”
“One of my biggest fears,” Willinger added, “is my guys getting divorced. Or turning to unhealthy coping mechanisms.”
Willinger said the department gets between 300 and 400 calls a day.
“Days where we get 400 calls are becoming more frequent,” he said.
Willinger went quiet as a call came through his radio.
“A woman had her purse stolen at T.J. Maxx,” he explained after listening for a moment longer. “We’re going to go to Target to see if we can’t find the suspects.”
This kind of theft is becoming more common, Willinger said. It goes like this: Someone distracts a woman holding a purse. While the victim is distracted, someone else snatches the purse and leaves the scene as quickly as possible. Then, they go to the nearest big-box store.
“They use the victim’s credit cards to buy as many gift cards as possible — before the victim can cancel their credit cards,” Willinger said. “Then the thieves ditch the purse.”
While Willinger and another patrol searched the Target parking lot for suspects, he spotted a white SUV parked in the fire lane right outside the store’s entrance. A terse exchange ensued:
Willinger: Excuse me, sir, are you aware that you’re parked in the fire lane?
Man: It’s all right. They’ll be out in a minute.
Willinger: Please, sir, I need you to move your vehicle. You’re blocking the fire lane.
Man: No, I’m not.
After speaking with the man for a few moments, Willinger gave him a warning. The man mumbled something else, then drove off into the parking lot.
“That’s one of those times that are challenging for officers on a regular day,” Willinger said as he returned to his vehicle. “When we’re burned out, we tend to have less patience.”
In other cases that turn more serious, St. George Police Chief Kyle Whitehead told St. George News the department sees an increase in the need for mental health resources.
“That’s stress,” Whitehead said. “I mean, just look around our society in the last five years. People are generally more stressed out. I’ve been seeing that in our staff here for a while.”
“But at the end of the day,” Whitehead continued, “I’ve got a job to do, the Police Department’s got a job to do. We’ll do the best we can with what we’ve been given.”
Whitehead spoke to the City Council in favor of the property tax increase. When they voted against it, he said there was some disappointment among the ranks of police officers.
“There were a lot of police officers, a lot of staff from the Police Department, that were there that felt like this was a very good investment in public safety,” he said. “Personally, I tend to agree. I think we have a stellar city administration. Our budget group has done a phenomenal job over the years, finding ways to fund the city and the growth without having to increase property taxes.”
It will be difficult to provide the same level of service if the city’s population continues to grow, Whitehead said, while the number of officers patrolling the streets remains the same.
“It adds stress to individual officers, which has ripple effects for the community,” he said. “Yeah, I worry. I’ve been seeing signs of burnout. Our staffing levels have gotten to a point that we’ve had to pull back on some services that traditionally we’ve been able to offer.”
In one example, Whitehead said that response times to “non-priority calls” have increased over the last four years.
“We’re trying to do the best we can with existing resources,” he said. “Our department has grown by 27% during that time.”
The challenge, he added, is that the city has seen explosive growth.
“That impacts all departments and all services across the city,” he said. “For us to keep up with the demand in public safety, we needed something additional.”
Whitehead said that as officers get burned out, supervisors start to see the signs of frustration and irritability that come from working long hours without having adequate time to recuperate.
“We don’t want to overwork our employees,” he said. “We want them to be able to enjoy their time off and have time to rest and be with their families.”
Where hiring is concerned, Whitehead said that careers in public safety aren’t as desirable as they once were, citing “public inaccuracies.”
“If we’re going to be competitive in the hiring,” he said, “we’ve got to raise wages.”
Find another U.S. city that hasn’t raised property taxes in 35 years
As she detailed the budgetary needs of the Police Department during a sit-down with St. George News, the mayor paused.
“Do I need to say again that, as a city, we haven’t raised property taxes in 35 years?” Randall asked. “How many cities in the U.S. have gone that long without a property tax increase?”
Randall, the first woman elected to serve as mayor of St. George, also sits on the Utah League of Cities and Towns’ Board of Directors.
As she recounted how upsetting it was for public safety personnel to see the vote to fund the Safe St. George initiative fail, she explained that The Truth in Taxation process ensures that municipal governments face a series of challenges before raising property taxes.
“We have to go through numerous steps to make sure we don’t run afoul of the Utah State Tax Commission, constitutional law, as well as St. George citizens.”
To take one example, Randall said that there was a Utah city that had raised taxes by 200%, whereas St. George sought to raise property taxes by a relatively modest 37%.
“My estimated property tax increase, in this case, would be $54 for the first year,” she said.
A portion of those funds would go toward raising wages for police officers.
“This will be key to attracting new hires and retaining veteran officers in an increasingly competitive job market,” she said. “The Utah Highway Patrol has raised wages. I’ve heard stories of departments up north calling our officers and offering them better pay in an attempt to lure them away from us.”
Randall said that a perfect storm led to the tax increase being voted down.
“When we built this budget, we didn’t see the current recession coming,” she said. “We didn’t see this rampant inflation coming.”
What happened?
Assistant City Manager Deanna Brklacich has worked for the city of St. George for 27 years. She’s prepared 15 city budgets during that time, but she said this one has been exceptional.
The budget process is long, detail-oriented work that requires time and collaboration. It’s an exchange between department heads with members of the City Council and city staff.
“The council members share their priorities,” Brklacich said, “and the department heads share their needs.”
“In this case, the council expressed the need to be aggressive about hiring public safety personnel and building up the infrastructure to support them,” she said. “Even then, we still took every measure to be good stewards of available funds.”
This year, Brklacich said there was a unique dovetail effect between the city’s growing need for public safety services and the potential for property taxes to fund those needs.
“We knew we needed sustainable, long-term funding for these positions,” she said. “While building two new fire stations requires one-time expenditures, salaries for personnel are ongoing.”
That created a gap. For the past 35 years, St. George officials have depended upon sales tax revenue to do the heavy lifting. But with inflation rising and talk of a recession, Brklacich said that revenues generated by sales tax may take a hit.
“Much of our sales tax revenue comes from large-ticket items like cars and furniture,” she said.
“We’re increasingly vulnerable when people stop buying things,” Brklacich said. “The city only gets about 1% of our sales tax, while 72% goes to the state.”
As inflation rises and fears of a recession set in, buyers tend to become more wary of purchasing those items. In which case, she said, property taxes offered the most viable way to fund those positions.
The case against the property tax increase
After leading the charge to vote down the property tax hike, Councilwoman Michelle Tanner told St. George News she expected resistance.
Tanner said she first encountered the Safe St. George Plan during a work session that focused on the budget in January 2022. To meet the demand of a growing population, city staff recommended the first property tax increase since 1987 to fund public safety. The average property tax increase in 2023 would have been $60 annually, or $5 a month, tapering off with each passing year.
Though it doesn’t seem like a lot, Tanner objected to the idea that the funds should come from raising property taxes.
“I wanted to see alternatives,” she said. “I wanted to go through the budget with a fine-tooth comb to see what could be cut.”
In an earlier interview, Tanner said, “As the city grows, we must support law enforcement in protecting our lives, liberty and property… If law enforcement needs more resources, we need to give it to them.”
So how to reconcile her vote against the property tax hike that would have provided the necessary funding?
“I feel that the Police Department has been misled,” Tanner said. “They were led to believe that the only way they would receive the funds they need to keep up with increasing demand was through taxes, but that’s not really true.”
Tanner said that while city officials were pushing for $3 million, there was only a $1 million deficit, and she refused to accept that a tax increase was warranted in that case.
So when is a tax increase warranted?
“To fund the proper role of government,” she said. “To fund the police in protecting our lives, liberty and property.”
In the absence of available funds, she claimed, one department that had excess resources was Leisure Services.
“Their budget went up 34% in the past year,” she said, “but we somehow don’t have enough money to fund public safety? That doesn’t make sense to me.”
Tanner said she saw excess spending in the staff budget as well.
“I don’t feel comfortable taking money from grandma to pay bloated wages to people like (City Manager) Adam Lenhard,” Tanner said. “We’ve got to prioritize public safety, water and roadways.”
Kicking the can
In June, Councilwoman Dannielle Larkin was one of four council members who voted to pass the Safe St. George plan. By the time Aug. 18 rolled around, she was alone in voting for the property tax increase in order to fund it.
In that moment, she said she was frustrated.
“We’d been working on Safe St. George for months. We need to hire 44 new police officers, 34 firefighters and 24 civilian positions. We need the infrastructure, vehicles and equipment necessary for their work. And we need the funds necessary to make these positions sustainable.”
Larkin said that every department within the city runs lean.
Like Tanner, Larkin said that she sees tax dollars as sacred. The thing that separates the two is that Larkin believes incremental property tax increases are required to maintain the “holistic health” of the city.
“Instead of raising taxes in increments, we’ve kicked the can down the road,” she said. “We’ve been robbing Peter to pay Paul for 35 years. As elected leaders, our job is to do the difficult thing, to make the difficult decision, for the good of the community.”
What that means, Larkin added, is that “when the bill finally comes due, we will have to implement a higher tax increase to get funds faster, and it will hit us all at once.”
The problems that the Safe St. George plan was designed to solve aren’t going away, Larkin said.
“It’s borderline reckless,” she said. “We need long-term, sustainable funding. What happens when we hire these new police officers, and they move here with their families, but we don’t know how we’re going to pay their salaries next year? These are real people; their livelihoods are on the line.”
So why does Larkin think the council voted against the tax hike?
“Political will,” she said. “It’s bad timing, plain and simple. Inflation is high. Washington County, the Water Department and the School District all raised their taxes. We’re the only governing body that hasn’t raised taxes.”
In the absence of a sustainable solution, Larkin said, the council will have the same conversation next year — and each year after that — until the problem is addressed in a pragmatic way.
For the mayor’s part, if she had had a say in the matter, she told St. George News she would have voted in favor of increasing the property tax in August.
“The amount of property tax we receive, as a city, does not cover our Fire Department budget,” Randall said. “After 35 years, without a city property tax increase, you have to make difficult decisions whether to cut services or increase services. I believe our residents always want us to increase services.”
St. George Fire Chief Robert Stoker said the police department isn’t alone in its challenges. As the city population grows, new homes are built farther from existing fire stations.
“That’s why we need to build new stations near The Ledges and Desert Canyon,” he said. “It’s important to know that, the farther your home is from a fire station, the higher your home insurance rates will be. The fewer police officers there are on the roads, the higher your auto insurance rates will be. In some cases, our new rates may offset the tax increase.”
Like the Police Department, the Fire Department is also seeing more calls. More calls, plus increased distances lead to delayed response times.
“To combat those challenges, we need to hire more firefighters and build more stations,” Stoker said. “Investing in these things now will save us time and money in the future.”
Residents may have to adjust their expectations
Councilman Jimmie Hughes said that when he was first elected to office, there were talks of raising property taxes.
“They’d say, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, ‘Oh, that you would be so lucky to be here when that happens,'” Hughes said of the contentious nature of increasing taxes. “In general, I’m against trying to raise any taxes. If there’s another way, we got to find another way.”
Hughes said that he had reservations about raising property taxes when the idea was floated in January, explaining that the only time he sees a property tax increase being necessary is to fund public safety.
“That’s why I was willing to have an open and proper debate about the possibility of increasing the property tax,” he said. “But I think it was misguided to say that, without that property tax increase, we wouldn’t be able to fund our public safety departments.”
Hughes said that his conscience is clean when it comes to voting against the property tax increase.
“A couple of things happened in the world between the time this property tax increase was introduced and the day I voted against it,” he said. “First, the economy in general is uncertain. And for us to blatantly ignore that and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to raise your property tax,’ however small that may be, because it was being sold as a very small amount without regard to what’s happening in the economy, is wrong.
“Secondly, when tax notices came out, we weren’t the only ones who wanted to raise taxes,” he added. “We had a large state increase. When I received my own personal tax statement, I was a little shocked.”
Hughes said that his taxes were going to rise more than $1,000 this year.
“But I’m still living in the same house that I’ve lived in for 18 years,” he said. “I built it for $250,000. So, I know there are many others living in the same kind of situation. And maybe their income hasn’t increased that much, but their property values did, and the area they live in, it did.”
“If I’m representing the typical citizen out there,” Hughes continued, “I might be a little concerned right now, and maybe we should take a step back.”
When he went into the Aug. 18 meeting, Hughes said he intended to vote against the property tax increase.
“I needed an epiphany to change my mind,” he said.
Though it didn’t come, Hughes said he still thought there was a good chance that it might pass.
“Because I didn’t know how the other council members felt 100 percent,” he said. “Obviously, a lot of people were disappointed that it didn’t pass. And we got some rather nasty messages, but that’s the nature of the game.”
Hughes said he believes there are other ways to fund public safety needs for the next five years.
“We are committed to this five-year plan,” he said. “One way or the other, we will find ways to fund it.”
Hughes added that, if push comes to shove, residents may have to adjust their expectations of what services will be provided.
“There should be a general discussion about our level of service across all city services,” Hughes said. “I believe that people can handle that conversation and that they can make rational decisions where, by no means is everyone going to agree, but we should be able to get to the best possible solution.”
City staff preps for an uncertain future
Assistant City Manager Deanna Brklacich said that the city has a plan in place in case inflation continues to run amok on the economy.
“If funding falls short,” she said, “the first step that I would recommend would be to amend our future plans and put them on hold or scale back.”
That means not adding expenses to the city’s budgets until revenues increase and stabilize. The Safe St. George plan was designed to be flexible in the face of the unpredictable nature of the economy.
“We cut or reduce the additional public safety personnel planned for years three through five of the plan,” she said. “It could also mean not adding new personnel needed in any of our other general fund departments, which include streets, parks and recreation.”
If the city still can’t cover costs, the next option would provide a short-term solution. That is to cut expenses starting with new projects and new equipment.
“Which is the approach our council decided to take instead of increasing property taxes,” Brklacich said. “If this doesn’t provide a sound budget, we would look at a combination of reducing operating expenses and personnel expenses.”
If that fails, city officials would consider cutting levels of service and programs offered to citizens, Brklacich added.
Those measures are outlined in the city’s Recession Readiness Plan, which was formalized and implemented during the 2020 and 2021 fiscal year budgets, in response to the pandemic.
The Recession Readiness Plan outlines the city’s approach based upon progression levels of mild, moderate and severe.
- The mild category suggests that the city would cut funding across the board by a percentage to be determined. It would include a hiring freeze, and a freeze on overtime for non-essential workers, among other measures.
- Moderate measures include reducing hours for part-time employees, reassigning personnel to meet critical needs and limiting hours of operation to cut expenses.
- In the event that severe measures are needed, the city would offer early retirement incentives, reduced pay across the board and, as a last resort, reduction of workforce.
When asked how the city would fund the five-year public safety plan if a recession sets in, Brklacich clasped her hands together, as though preparing to pray. “I’m hoping we don’t go into a deep recession,” she said, looking up toward the ceiling.
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