Stay tuned this fall as glossy professional postcards flood your mailbox with messages urging you to accept that Saginaw’s 45-year-old property tax dollar cap is obsolete and should be repealed by a yes vote on Proposal One. This taxpayer-funded media blitz will blanket our social media feeds, airwaves, yards, and community bulletin boards to try to persuade taxpayers to vote against their own interests and raise taxes on themselves.                                                                                         

We have seen all this before — seven times before. Since the voters imposed the city property tax cap in 1979 the city government has tried seven times to repeal it, claiming each time that it was starved of tax money and forced to live on 1978 dollars. The people rejected them every time, sending a landslide message to restrain their spending and focus on essentials.

The government’s response each time was not to heed that call, but to find one workaround after another to maintain its desired revenue by other means. Today the city has more money to spend than ever, because the government first raised the city income tax by 50 percent without a vote, and then took the “essentials” out of the general city budget and gave voters a choice: forgo services or pay special millages and fees to keep them.

Voters have approved and renewed a dedicated 7.5-mill police levy, a transit millage, and library millages, and property owners are billed a flat annual assessment for trash pickup on their property t  tax bills.

All of these fees and taxes come on top of the total tax burden already borne by citizens.       

The city government’s messaging is simple, emotionally charged, and almost pleading in tone: The city is starving. We desperately need you to repeal the 1979 property tax cap just to keep the lights on, the streets safe, and our community afloat. It is a compelling narrative, engineered to tug at civic pride and anxiety. It is also a carefully constructed deception — again.                                         

What Saginaw residents are witnessing is not a grassroots civic movement like the original 1979 campaign that imposed the cap in the first place. It is a well-funded, top-down campaign engineered by city insiders, highly paid municipal consultants, and political operatives who stand to benefit directly from a massive, unrestricted influx of un-voted tax revenue.

The goal is not to improve your quality of life. The goal is to persuade working-class homeowners, small-scale landlords, and — most importantly — the economically vulnerable renters of Saginaw to vote for their own financial harm by making the worse appear better to those not skilled in the ways of the world.

Behind the “Vote Yes” campaign lies a multi-decade record of municipal hypocrisy, aggressive Freedom of Information Act  stonewalling, and a shadow-tax apparatus designed to extract wealth from an already overtaxed property tax base.

Proposal One is not a lifeline. It is a tax increase presented as a simple charter cleanup — a structural power grab that would permanently dismantle the last financial shield citizens have against unchecked government spending.

If you are a homeowner who spent decades building equity, Proposal One reaches into your net worth. If you are a renter, Proposal One removes the one mechanism in the entire tax system that has been quietly holding your rent down. What follows is the documented, mathematically verifiable account of what Proposal One actually does, how the City has systematically obscured the real tax burden from its citizens, and why a NO vote is the way to protect our community’s economic future.

PART I: THE HYPOCRISY OF A “STARVING” GOVERNMENT

Before unpacking the mathematical reality of Proposal One, we must examine the credibility of the institution asking for this blank check. The City claims it is starved for revenue, crippled by a $3.8 million property tax cap instituted by wise voters in 1979. It insists that if we simply hand over more revenue, the city will transform into a well-oiled machine of efficiency, safety, and prosperity.

The city’s recent operational history reveals a very different reality. Saginaw is not suffering from a lack of revenue; it suffers from a profound lack of respect for its taxpayers, an obsession with pet projects over basic services, and a deeply ingrained culture of administrative secrecy.

Administrative Secrecy & Freedom of Information Act Stonewalling

If you try to verify or discern how the city spends its general funds, or how this campaign to remove the tax cap is being internally coordinated, try filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and you will run face-first into a fortified bureaucratic wall.

The city’s tactics are well documented and deliberate:

• Inflated cost estimates for simple document retrieval — hundreds or thousands of dollars just to review a handful of financial emails. It is a ransom designed to make you drop your inquiry.

• Statutory delay extensions stacked end to end, pushing legally required responses out weeks or months until the requested information is no longer politically relevant

• Heavy-handed redactions that hide the very context and substance the public is legally entitled to see.

• Narrow, bad-faith legal interpretations of what constitutes a “public record,” deployed to shield embarrassing failures and internal communications from the light of day,’

This is not a mistake or a resource problem. It is a calculated strategy to ensure citizens cannot follow the money trail. When the real debates and spending decisions are shaped before the public meeting begins, the council meeting itself becomes theater — and the real business of Saginaw is conducted out of public view.

The Income Tax Increase and Service Failures

Saginaw’s 1.5 percent income tax, raised by 50 percent without a vote in 1989, supplies the bulk of Saginaw’s tax revenue. When the city government says it is living on 1978 dollars, it leaves out this inflation-proof source of roughly 35 percent of city general fund revenue. The city laments its property tax restrictions while leaning on the local income tax, ensuring that anyone who lives or works within city limits is taxed from both sides of the paycheck — and it still claims poverty.

The city is asking for a permanent property tax expansion while providing degrading basic services. Potholes don’t just damage suspensions; they swallow tires whole. Blight remediation is entirely reactive, leaving neighborhoods to deteriorate until complaints become too loud to ignore. “Economic development” too often means multi-year tax abatements for the politically connected and out-of-state developers, while the working-class city pays full price for crumbling infrastructure.

This is the glaring hypocrisy of the Proposal One campaign. The very officials who obstruct public records requests, mismanage community treasures like Ojibway Island, and extract local income taxes from your paycheck are now asking you to voluntarily surrender your last line of financial defense.

They have proven, year after year, that they are not responsible stewards of your money. Giving them millions more in unrestricted revenue will not change their behavior; it will only reward and embolden it.

Most recently, a sitting member of the Saginaw City Council was so troubled by what she witnessed that she put it in writing:

“This past Monday, Saginaw City Council voted 7–1 for a $288,958 appropriation with no oversight and a disturbing lack of information. I was the only vote ‘no.’ Somehow, a mystery $288k from the 2020 CARES Act legislation ended up on our agenda for Monday’s meeting. All our money from the CARES Act, according to City records, was spent years ago. Staff said there hadn’t been a clawback from previous programs and told Council that the money has just been sitting in an account waiting to be drawn down — but that’s not how that process is supposed to work with HUD. $300k, gone just like that, with zero input from your elected representatives, and zero oversight.” 

 The money was given to United Way of Saginaw, and that non-profit disburses the funds as it sees fit with no oversight. This is the same non-profit NGO that Rep. Amos O’Neal (D) — the same state rep who has been trying to eliminate the tax cap at the state level — worked for when he was [being groomed for] politics as a city councilman.

PART II: THE MULTI-LAYERED TAX REALITY

The foundational claim of the “Vote Yes” campaign is that the City of Saginaw operates on a microscopic property tax rate. The City points to its legally suppressed operating rate — currently 6.3365 mills — and asks with mock incredulity: “How can we possibly survive, let alone provide adequate police and fire protection, on so little?”

It is a masterful sleight of hand. That operating number is a curated fraction of the whole. It ignores the architecture of shadow taxes, independent authorities, special assessments, and flat fees that the city and county have layered on over forty years to route around the 1979 cap. Every figure below comes from a single certified public document: the Saginaw County Equalization Department’s 2024 Millage Rate Report. Check it yourself.

Over the decades, whenever the city hit the $3.8 million ceiling, instead of tightening its belt like any family or small business must, it chose a more creative path: spin a vital service out of the general budget, create a new independent authority or assessment, and tax residents separately for it. Here is what a Saginaw property owner actually pays:

• The Suppressed City Operating Millage: 6.3365 Mills. 

This is the baseline — the only number the City wants you to look at. And note something the City never mentions: the county’s 2024 report lists the city’s operating rate at 6.7368 mills, while the current rate is 6.3365. The rate fell. Why? Because that is exactly what the 1979 dollar cap is designed to do: as the city’s total taxable value grows, the cap automatically compresses the rate so the city cannot collect more than $3.8 million.

The “shrinking” rate the City complains about is not starvation — it is the cap delivering automatic tax relief to every property owner in Saginaw, precisely as the voters intended. Remember this mechanism; it becomes critical in Part IV.

• The 7.5-Mill City Police Levy (The Central Omission)

If one fact undermines the city’s “starving” narrative, it is police funding. The campaign’s primary emotional appeal is the specter of compromised public safety: without lifting the cap, police and fire services will wither. What the mailers do not tell you is that Saginaw property owners already pay a dedicated, voted levy of 7.5 mills — designated in the county’s certified millage report as “Police, on Real Property only” — explicitly and exclusively for the police, entirely outside the 1979 cap. The city taxes real property at 7.5 mills for police beyond the cap, then points at the capped general fund and warns that public safety is starved. They have already secured a massive dedicated revenue stream for the police, yet they use the police as political leverage to lift the cap on general administrative spending.

• The Independent Spin-Offs (The Shadow Taxes)

Saginaw Transit System Authority (STARS): 3.2000 mills. Instead of funding public transportation through the general fund, the City spun the buses out to tax you separately — more than 3 mills stacked on top of the operating and police millages.

Public Libraries of Saginaw: 3.9947 mills (charter and voted combined). Rather than prioritize libraries within the general budget, the City spun them out too — nearly 4 additional mills, entirely outside the 1979 cap.

County Roads: 2.0000 mills. Approved in 2024 — a premium extra tax to cover basic infrastructure that foundational taxes should already cover.County Sheriff Service: 1.7473 mills. A county-wide levy city residents pay into, despite relying primarily on the Saginaw Police Department — which they already fund with a dedicated 7.5 mills.

That is 18.44 mills of property tax layered outside the cap — nearly three times the operating rate the City complains about — before the general operating fund collects its first dollar. (Source: Saginaw County Equalization Department, 2024 Millage Rate Report, certified March 28, 2025.)

The Mandatory Trash “Fee”: Newly increased to $250 Per Household, Per Year.   This is the most instructive sleight of hand in the entire playbook. Picking up the garbage is arguably the most fundamental duty of a municipality — the first thing a general operating millage should cover. But to free up general fund money, the city instituted a mandatory flat assessment of  $250 per household, every year, just to have trash picked up.

Because it is classified as a “fee” and not a property tax, it bypasses both the 1979 cap and the state-level Headlee limit entirely. Whether you live in a $20,000 fixer-upper or a $300,000 historic-district home, you pay the same flat amount — a deeply regressive burden that hits the poorest households, fixed-income seniors, and working single parents hardest.

The picture that emerges: Residents are already carrying 18.44 mills of levies outside the cap — the 7.5-mill police levy, the transit authority, the libraries, the county add-ons — plus a regressive flat fee to get the garbage picked up. Add to that amount the 1.5 city income tax and you can see the city is not starves of tax dollars it is awash money.

What the city government lacks is humility, restraint, and lack of respect for the taxpayers. When the city cries poverty, it ignores the wealth it has already extracted through these backdoor channels. Proposal One is not fixing an underfunded system; it is piling a new burden on an exhausted, overtaxed base.

PART III: THE IMMEDIATE CONSEQUENCE OF REPEALING THE CAP

The proponents of Proposal One speak in vague platitudes: “unlocking the city’s true potential,” “modernizing the outdated charter,” “preparing Saginaw for a bright future.” What they decline to discuss is the arithmetic of what happens if Proposal One 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 percent — without any further vote of the people.

While some city officials have suggested they might phase in any increase gradually, Proposal One removes the only structural limit that currently prevents them from raising the rate 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 increase would cost city households in the first year: