This Fall when you walk down almost any pock-marked street in the City of Saginaw you will undoubtedly see them: the glossy, professionally printed, impeccably designed campaign signs urging you to vote ‘Yes’ on Proposal 1. They will be strategically placed in high-traffic medians, and accompanied by a slick, well-funded, and relentlessly coordinated publicly funded blitz that will be blanketing our local social media feeds, airwaves, and community bulletin boards. Vote ‘NO’ signs will, as usual, disappear in the middle of the night without explanation.

The messaging engineered by this campaign is simple, emotionally manipulative, and almost pleading in its tone: The city is starving. We are operating on a shoestring budget. We desperately need you to repeal the 1979 property tax cap just to keep the lights on, the streets safe, and our beloved community afloat. It is a highly compelling narrative, carefully focused to tug at the civic pride and anxieties of everyday citizens.

It is also a carefully constructed deception.

What the hardworking residents of Saginaw are currently witnessing is not a grassroots civic movement to save a struggling municipality, like the original 1979 tax cap campaign was. It is a well-funded, top-down campaign — a fake grassroots initiative meticulously engineered by city insiders, highly paid municipal consultants, and political elites who stand to benefit directly from a massive, unrestricted influx of un-voted tax revenue.

Their goal is not to improve your quality of life. Their goal is to trick the working-class homeowners, the small-scale landlords, and most importantly, the economically vulnerable renters of Saginaw into eagerly and willingly voting for their own financial ruin.

Behind the velvet curtain of this “Vote Yes” campaign lies a staggering, multi-decade track record of municipal hypocrisy, blatant public body act violations, aggressive Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) stonewalling, and a shadow-tax apparatus designed to relentlessly extract wealth from an already exhausted, overtaxed base.

Proposal 1 is not a lifeline for a struggling city trying to find its footing in the 21st century. It is a massive, un-voted tax hike masquerading as a simple bureaucratic charter cleanup. It is a structural power grab that seeks to permanently dismantle the very last remaining financial shield the citizens of this city have against unchecked government spending.

If you are a homeowner who spent decades building equity in your property, Proposal 1 is a direct, unavoidable assault on your net worth. If you are a renter scraping together your monthly payments, Proposal 1 is a merciless eviction engine that will automatically, irreversibly drive up your monthly rent.

This is the definitive, unvarnished, mathematically proven truth about what Proposal 1 actually does, how the City of Saginaw has systematically and intentionally hidden the real tax burden from its citizens, and why a resounding, overwhelming NO vote is the absolute only way to protect our community’s economic future.

PART I: The Hypocrisy of a 'Starving' Government

Before we can even begin to unpack the complex and devastating mathematical reality of Proposal 1, we must first examine the credibility, the track record, and the fundamental trustworthiness of the institution asking you for this blank check. The City of Saginaw claims it is starved for revenue, artificially crippled by a $3.8 million property tax cap instituted by wise voters back in 1979. They insist that if we just remove this cap — if we simply hand them the keys to the treasury and remove our own legal protections — the city will magically, instantly transform into a well-oiled machine of civic efficiency, unprecedented safety, and economic prosperity.

However, a cursory examination of the city’s recent operational history reveals a very different, far more disturbing reality. The City of Saginaw is not suffering from a lack of revenue; it is suffering from a profound lack of respect for its taxpayers, an obsession with funding pet projects over delivering basic municipal services, and a deeply ingrained culture of administrative secrecy.

The Ojibway Island Controversy: A Microcosm of Arrogance

Consider the ongoing, infuriating, and entirely avoidable debacle surrounding Ojibway Island. This beloved community asset, long considered a crown jewel of Saginaw's parks system, has been transformed by City Hall into a glaring monument to bureaucratic arrogance and civic mismanagement.

• When the city embarked on its latest round of construction and so-called "improvements," it did so with a blatant, insulting disregard for genuine community input and historical usage patterns.

• When residents rightfully demanded answers about simple, everyday issues — vehicular access for families hauling picnic gear, safety protocols, hours of operation, and the sudden, unannounced installation of surveillance cameras — they were met with the standard Saginaw City Hall response: silence, deflection, condescension, and backroom maneuvering.

• The profound disconnect between what the taxpaying citizens want and what the council autocratically dictates was fully, embarrassingly exposed in recent council battles.

• When a common-sense motion was introduced to simply listen to the community and direct staff to fully reopen the Island to vehicular traffic immediately upon the completion of the scheduled construction, the response from the administration was shockingly hostile.

It was a proposal backed by community surveys, neighborhood groups, and the basic reality that a park surrounded by water requires vehicular access for the elderly, the disabled, and families with young children.

• The result? The City Council killed the motion in a lopsided, dismissive vote after extended, contentious debate. Extended public commentary from passionate citizens was completely ignored. Valid community concerns regarding accessibility were dismissed out of hand as mere "complaints."

Instead, the council opted for heavily delayed access, fragmented trial periods, and the installation of emergency "tower" call boxes and cameras using federal ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) funds. They took federal relief money meant to stabilize the community and used it to fund a surveillance and restriction apparatus that fundamentally alters the welcoming nature of the park, while completely ignoring the core requests of the taxpayers who actually fund the park's existence.

The council’s actions on Ojibway Island represent a perfect, undeniable microcosm of how this city operates on a day-to-day basis: they take over public spaces, they restrict public access, they spend massive amounts of public money on unrequested, top-down alterations, and then they entirely shut the public out of the decision-making process.

Ask yourself: Does this sound like a government that can be trusted with millions of dollars in newly unlocked, un-capped property tax revenues? Does this sound like an administration that will use your hard-earned money to deliver the essential services you want, rather than the legacy-building pet projects they prefer?

The Architecture of Administrative Secrecy & FOIA Stonewalling

This institutional arrogance extends far beyond the parks and recreation department. The culture of secrecy inside Saginaw City Hall is ruthlessly enforced through aggressive, bad-faith transparency non-disclosure tactics. Try being a concerned citizen, a neighborhood association leader, or an independent journalist filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to see exactly how the city is spending its general funds, or to uncover how this very campaign is being internally coordinated. You will not find open doors and transparent ledgers. You will immediately run face-first into a towering, heavily fortified bureaucratic wall.

The city’s tactics for defeating citizen oversight are well-documented, intentionally demoralizing, and entirely deliberate:

• They include slapping citizens with absurdly inflated cost estimates for simple document retrieval — quoting residents hundreds or even thousands of dollars just to review a handful of basic financial emails or internal memos. It is a financial ransom designed specifically to make you drop your inquiry.

• When they aren't pricing you out of your right to know, they utilize endless statutory delay extensions, pushing their legally required responses out weeks or months until the information you requested is no longer politically relevant.

• When documents are finally, begrudgingly released, they are almost universally subjected to heavy-handed, black-marker redactions that hide the very context and substance the public is legally entitled to see.

• They rely on incredibly narrow, bad-faith legal interpretations of what constitutes a "public record" to shield embarrassing failures, cost overruns, or damning internal communications from the light of day.

This is not a mistake. It is not a symptom of a lack of administrative resources. It is a calculated, weaponized strategy. By abusing the FOIA process, the city ensures that investigative citizens cannot follow the money trail. Combine this deeply ingrained hostility to public records with repeated, highly credible murmurs of Open Meetings Act (OMA) violations — where the actual debates, compromises, and spending decisions happen behind closed doors or in private sub-committees before the performative, gavel-to-gavel public meetings even begin — and a dark, undeniable picture emerges.

The public city council meetings are just theater. The real business of Saginaw, the real spending of your tax dollars, is conducted safely in the shadows.

The Income Tax Squeeze and Catastrophic Service Failures

Let us not forget the crushing reality of the local income tax, which the city completely ignores in their push to lift the current tax cap. The city routinely, loudly laments its property tax restrictions in its campaign literature, while aggressively leaning on the local income tax, ensuring that anyone who lives or works within the city limits is bled from both sides of their paycheck. They hike the income tax, they aggressively audit the working class, they spin off essential services to separate funds, and they still have the audacity to claim poverty.

They are asking for a massive, permanent property tax expansion while simultaneously providing poor, degrading, often humiliating basic services that would be utterly unacceptable in any properly managed municipality. Take a drive down major thoroughfares or our neighborhood side streets. Potholes don't just damage suspensions; they swallow tires whole. Blight remediation is entirely reactive rather than proactively managed, leaving neighborhoods to rot, property values to stagnate, and dangerous structures to stand until the citizen complaints become too loud to legally ignore. Economic development in Saginaw is too often just a hollow buzzword used to justify handing out massive, multi-year tax abatements to the politically connected few, to out-of-state developers, and to corporate entities, while the rest of the working-class city pays full price for crumbling infrastructure.

This is the inescapable, glaring hypocrisy of the Proposal 1 campaign. The very same officials who actively hide public records, who violate the spirit (and often the letter) of public body transparency laws, who severely mismanage community treasures like Ojibway Island, and who rely heavily on extracting local income taxes from your paycheck are now asking you to voluntarily surrender your last line of financial defense: the 1979 property tax cap. They have proven, time and time again, year after year, that they are not responsible stewards of your money. Giving them millions more in unrestricted revenue will not change their fundamental behavior; it will only reward and embolden it.

PART II: The Multi-Layered Tax Reality

The foundational lie of the “Vote Yes” campaign — the core mythology upon which all their glossy propaganda is built — is that the City of Saginaw is operating on a microscopic, emaciated property tax rate. The City repeatedly and loudly claims it is starved at exactly 6.3365 mills for general operations. They point to this legally suppressed number on their mailers, they highlight it in their presentations, and they ask with mock incredulity, “Look how little we have! Look at this tiny fraction! How can we possibly survive, let alone thrive and provide adequate police and fire protection, on a mere 6.3365 mills?”

Over the decades, whenever the city hit the $3.8 million ceiling mandated by the voters in 1979, instead of tightening its belt, prioritizing essential services, and living within its means like any family or small business must do, it chose a different, much more deceptive path. It simply amputated a vital city service, created a brand-new, independent "authority" or "assessment district" to run it, and taxed the residents separately for it.

Here is the brutal, unvarnished mathematical reality of what a Saginaw property owner actually pays:

 1. The Suppressed City Operating Millage: 6.3365 mills.  This is the baseline. This is the only number the City wants you to look at. This is the bait on the hook. It represents the general operations of the city, constrained by the mathematical formula dictated by the 1979 cap.

2. 1.5% Income Tax – increased in 1989 without a vote and designed to circumvent the tax cap this accounts for 35% of city general fund revenue.

3. The 7.5 City Police Millage (The Ultimate Deception). If there is one singular fact that completely shatters the city's narrative they are "starving," it is the reality of police funding. The primary emotional threat the "Vote Yes" campaign uses to scare voters into passing Proposal 1 is the specter of compromised public safety. They claim that without lifting the cap, police and fire services will wither and die.

What they absolutely refuse to tell you on their glossy mailers is that Saginaw citizens are already paying a massive, dedicated 7.5 mills explicitly and exclusively for the police.   Years ago, recognizing that they wanted to spend general fund money on other administrative priorities and pet projects, the city utilized legal loopholes (such as special assessment districts under Public Act 33) to completely bypass the 1979 general operating cap to fund public safety.

The residents of Saginaw already shoulder a towering 7.5 mill burden specifically for their police department, wholly separate from the 6.3365 mills in the general fund. They are taxing you at the maximum allowable limit for police outside the cap, while simultaneously pointing to the inside-the-cap general fund and crying that public safety is starved. It is a stunning display of financial double-speak. They have already extracted a massive revenue stream for the police, yet they are using the police as political hostages to force you to lift the cap on their general administrative slush fund.

3. The Independent Spin-Offs (The Shadow Taxes). To bypass the 1979 cap even further, the city spun other vital, basic municipal services out of the general fund entirely so they could tax you independently without hitting the $3.8 million ceiling.

• STARS Transit Authority: ~2.9 mills. Public transportation is a hallmark of a functioning municipal government. But instead of prioritizing it and funding it through the general fund, the City spun the public buses out to tax you separately. You are paying this nearly 3-mill burden squarely on top of the city operating millage and the police millage.

.• County Roads: 2.0000 mills. Passed just recently in 2024. Property owners are forced to pay a premium extra tax just to cover basic infrastructure that foundational taxes should already be covering.

• Sheriff Service: 1.7473 mills. Another massive county-wide levy that city residents pay into, despite relying primarily on the Saginaw City Police (which they already fund with 7.5 mills) for their immediate public safety needs.

4. The Mandatory Trash "Fee": $200 per household, per year.   This is perhaps the most egregious, insulting, and deeply regressive sleight of hand in the entire municipal playbook. Picking up the garbage and ensuring basic community sanitation is arguably the single most fundamental duty of a localized municipality. It should be the very first thing covered by the general operating millage. But because the city wanted to free up more general fund money to play with, they instituted a mandatory, unavoidable flat assessment of roughly $200 per household, every single year, just to have your trash picked up.

Because they cleverly, maliciously classify this as a "fee" and not a property tax, it bypasses both the local 1979 cap and the state-level Headlee limit entirely. It does not matter if you live in a $20,000 fixer-upper in a struggling neighborhood or a $300,000 mansion in a historic district — you pay the exact same flat fee. It is a deeply regressive financial burden that hits the poorest, most vulnerable households, fixed-income seniors, and working single mothers in Saginaw exponentially harder than the wealthiest.

The True Campaign Message You Must Hear: When you add it all up, the campaign's narrative completely, spectacularly collapses. City residents are already drowning in massive layers of "extra" property taxes just to cover the 7.5 mill police assessment, the transit authority, county levies, plus a highly regressive flat fee just to get their garbage picked up from the curb. When the city cries poverty, they are willfully, intentionally ignoring the unassailable fact that they have already extracted maximum wealth from this community through these backdoor channels and shadow taxes. Proposal 1 isn't fixing a broken, underfunded system; it's piling a massive, unprecedented new burden squarely on top of an already exhausted, overtaxed, and economically strained base. The campaign wants you to put blinders on. They want you to look only at the artificially suppressed 6.3365 mills and completely ignore the towering, suffocating mountain of taxation sitting right on top of it. Do not let them insult your intelligence.

PART III: The Real Consequence of Repealing the Cap

The proponents of Proposal 1, backed by their expensive public relations firms and slick political consultants, speak exclusively in vague, comforting, corporate-speak platitudes. They talk endlessly about "unlocking the city's true potential," "modernizing the outdated city charter," and "preparing Saginaw for a bright future." What they absolutely, steadfastly refuse to talk about is the brutal mathematical reality of what happens if Proposal 1 passes.

Repealing the $3.8 million property tax cap would immediately give the City Council the legal authority to raise the operating millage rate from the current 6.3365 mills to as high as 7.3830 mills — an increase of more than 16% — without any further vote of the people.

While some city officials have suggested they might phase in any increase gradually, Proposal 1 removes the only structural limit that currently prevents them from raising taxes significantly whenever they choose. Once the cap is gone, nothing in the charter stops the city from moving to the full Headlee maximum in the very next budget cycle.

Here is exactly what that potential increase would cost City households:

If you want to know your exact tax impact, use the tax burden calculator at www.TaxHike.org. To the wealthy consultants running this campaign, forty or eighty dollars might seem like trivial pocket change. But to a senior citizen living on a fixed Social Security income, or a working-class family already struggling to pay the inflated cost of groceries, gasoline, and winter heating utilities, that increase is a devastating and entirely unnecessary blow.

And here is the most vital truth: This increase happens without the City providing a single new or improved service. When your taxes go up, the city will not hire a single new police officer (remember, you already pay 7.5 mills for that anyway). They will not fix a single new pothole on your street. They will not clean up a single blighted lot in your neighborhood. This is simply the administrative cost of removing your legal shield. You are paying more for the exact same broken, unresponsive, secretive, and inefficient government you had before.

PART IV: The Long-Term Cost - The Eviction & Rent Hike Engine

The potential tax increase is infuriating. It is deceptive and it is greedy. But in the grand scheme of Saginaw's economic future, it is merely a paper cut compared to the mortal, bleeding wound Proposal 1 will inflict on our housing market over the next decade. The true, existential danger of repealing the 1979 $3.8 million cap lies in how it interacts with state tax law — specifically, the devastating, wealth-extracting mechanics of the Proposal A Ratchet.

The City of Saginaw has a highly unique, specific demographic makeup. Unlike wealthy, sprawling, newly built suburbs, Saginaw has a very high concentration of rental properties, multi-family homes, and large apartment complexes. A massive percentage of our population does not own the roof over their heads. Therefore, the most economically vulnerable population in our entire city is our renters. And make no mistake: It is the renters of Saginaw who are going to pay the ultimate, devastating price if Proposal 1 passes.

The campaign has tried desperately to convince tenants that property taxes are a "landlord problem." They want renters to believe that if taxes go up, it only hurts the wealthy property owners, the out-of-state holding companies, and the corporate conglomerates. We must heavily target the renter demographic with the absolute, unshakeable economic truth of the real estate market: Property taxes directly dictate rent prices. When taxes go up, rent goes up. Period.

 Here is the exact, step-by-step mechanism of how Proposal 1 will act as an eviction engine:

 The Mechanics of Uncapping Under Proposal A

Under Michigan’s Proposal A, passed by state voters in 1994, a property’s "Taxable Value" (the number you are taxed upon) is capped. As long as you own your home or a landlord owns their building, the Taxable Value can only rise by the rate of inflation (or 5%, whichever is strictly less). Over time, especially in an inflationary environment, a massive gap develops between a property's low, protected Taxable Value and its true, much higher Market Value (its State Equalized Value, or SEV). However, the moment a property is sold, transferred, or bought out by a corporation, a catastrophic financial event occurs: the property "uncaps." The protective lid is blown off, and the property's Taxable Value instantly shoots up to match its current Market Value. For a duplex or an apartment building that hasn't been sold in fifteen or twenty years, an uncapping event means the property taxes will literally double or triple overnight.

How the 1979 Cap Currently Protects Saginaw's Renters

Right now, Saginaw’s 1979 cap acts as a miracle of economic protection for working-class neighborhoods and renters. Because the city is strictly limited to collecting a maximum of $3.8 million in general operating funds, what happens when a massive apartment complex is sold to an out-of-state corporation, or a large portfolio of rental homes changes hands? The total taxable value in the city spikes dramatically because of the uncapping.

But, because the city cannot legally collect more than $3.8 million total, the 1979 cap forces the city to actually lower the overall millage rate across the board to mathematically compensate for the massive influx of new taxable value. Under the current system, when a landlord’s property uncaps, the 1979 limit acts as a giant municipal shock absorber. It shields the rest of the neighborhood from a tax spike. It forces the millage down, keeping the landlord's new tax burden somewhat manageable. And because the landlord's tax burden remains manageable, it keeps the rent stable for the tenant.

The 1979 cap is the invisible force keeping Saginaw's rent affordable. It is the only thing standing between our renters and the crushing forces of the open real estate market.

And here is the brutal, undeniable reality of the real estate market that the campaign hopes you ignore: landlords do not absorb property tax hikes out of the goodness of their hearts. They do not view massive tax increases as a personal burden to be borne silently for the good of the community. They do not take a cut to their profit margins. They will instantly, legally, and aggressively pass every single dime of that massive tax hike directly onto the tenant in the form of higher rent.

Imagine a single mother renting a modest three-bedroom home in Saginaw. If you are scraping by on hourly wages, if you are a senior citizen living on fixed-income social security, or if you are a young family trying desperately to save up enough money to finally buy your own home in Saginaw, a sudden, aggressive $150-a-month rent hike will break you. It will lead to skipped meals, unpaid utility bills, and ultimately, eviction. It will shatter the economic stability of thousands of households.

 The Renter/Landlord Campaign Message must be shouted from every rooftop, every street corner, every church pulpit, and every community center in the city: "Proposal 1 is an automatic, inescapable rent hike. When the City uncaps property taxes, landlords don't pay the difference — tenants do. A 'Yes' vote on Proposal 1 prices working families right out of their own neighborhoods."

The campaign, heavily funded by political elites, wealthy consultants, and comfortable bureaucrats who will never have to worry about making rent on the first of the month, is actively trying to trick tenants into voting to increase their own cost of living. It is a cynical, cruel, and deeply unethical strategy. It relies entirely on the density and complexity of the municipal tax code to mask a massive wealth transfer from the poorest, most vulnerable residents of Saginaw straight into the general fund of an unaccountable City Hall.

PART V: THE FINAL VERDICT — DO NOT HAND OVER THE KEYS

When you step back from the glossy mailers and ignore the manufactured panic of the political elites, and look at the totality of the circumstances objectively, the path forward for the citizens of Saginaw becomes crystal clear.

• We have a city government that routinely, purposefully operates in the shadows, obstructing public records requests and skirting the edges of the Open Meetings Act to pass deeply unpopular directives out of public view.

• We have a government that severely, arrogantly mismanages community treasures like Ojibway Island,completely ignoring desperate pleas from the public for common-sense vehicular access, choosing instead to spend federal relief funds on surveillance towers.

• We have a government that complains about being starved for public safety funds, while conveniently omitting the fact that they are already extracting a massive, dedicated 7.5 mill tax explicitly for the police department outside the general cap.

• We have a government that already bleeds its citizens dry through high local income taxes, a deeply regressive flat trash "fee," and a sprawling web of spin-off authorities and county wish-lists that total over 18 mills of taxation before they even look at their general operating fund.

And now, this very same government is spending heavily on a slick public relations campaign to convince you to voluntarily surrender the only financial protection you have left: the 1979 tax cap.

Proposal 1 is a blank check written on an overdrawn account. It is a reward for bad administrative behavior, poor civic management, and a serious lack of accountability. It is time for the residents of Saginaw — homeowners and renters, young families and seniors alike — to draw a hard, unyielding line in the sand. It is time to demand a government that lives within its means, respects its taxpayers, operates in the bright light of day, and delivers the basic municipal services we are already paying a massive premium for.

Do not be fooled by the glossy signs littering the medians. Do not be manipulated by a campaign funded by those who stand to profit from your loss. Protect your home equity. Protect your monthly rent. Protect your most vulnerable neighbors from the cruelty of tax-driven eviction.

Find out more at www.TaxHike.org

Send a message that City Hall cannot ignore, cannot redact, and cannot spin. Keep the shield in place. Keep the cap intact.

Vote NO on Proposal 1.