More On The Expensive Public Safety Millage Scam – How Much It May Cost You And How It Could Include A Trojan Horse for More Future Taxes Without Your Vote!

 

“[T]he Village Council can unequivocably state that cityhood will provide more revenue than it will cost.”

(That quote is from “Transformed: Clarkston is Now a City,” Clarkston News, July 1, 1992.)

Suckers. That was then. This is now, and the city wants everything you’re already paying them plus a whole lot more. I doubt there ever was a year where being a city saved residents money. False promises from city government have apparently been with us for as long as we’ve been a city.

If you Google “public safety millage,” you’ll see that all the cool kids are doing it. It has a catchy name, doesn’t it? I mean, everybody loooooves public safety. So why not have a “public safety millage”?

Here’s a bit of Clarkston “public safety” history. After disbanding our small but freaking awesome public service-oriented Clarkston police department because we supposedly “couldn’t afford it,” the city began contracting with Independence Township for police services. Independence Township in turn contracts with the Oakland County Sheriff.

And that’s how we sacrificed awesome police service for crap police service. Then the city took all the “savings” from eliminating the police department and blew it. Just like every other tax dollar it takes in. (We’ve always contracted with Independence Township for fire services.)

How bad is our police service? Quite bad, actually. Citizens and the city council constantly complain about the lack of service from the Oakland County Sheriff. There are hardly any traffic citations issued. Residents regularly report speeding on side streets far in excess of the speed limit. One resident even witnessed a drag race! And then there are all the unsupervised kids on e-bikes racing through downtown on the sidewalks that are going to kill grandma or themselves one of these days. The sheriff is not going to enforce our ordinance requiring bikes be walked on sidewalks downtown. Sorry, grandma.

The Oakland County Sheriff issued a grand total of 24 traffic citations from January to June 2026. That’s less than one a week. You can call the substation and complain, but they’ll just add a tick mark to their monthly report showing there was a request for a service call – that they’ll do nothing about because the speeders and drag racers are long gone by the time you call and they flatly refuse to assign an officer to periodically watch for speeders. At the July 27, 2026, city council meeting, our Oakland County Sheriff representative dismissed the complaints saying, “I have a complaint for every, every road in this 36 square miles [including both Clarkston and Independence Township]. We’re responsible for 36 square miles, and I have a complaint for every road.” And gosh, they’re short-staffed. Too bad, so sad for you Clarkston. They’ve got bigger fish to fry in the larger Independence Township area as opposed to our one-half square mile. But they’ll charge us the full price for police services anyway.

The city manager has refused to explore alternatives to paying Independence Township for abysmal police service. There are other municipalities with police departments who would probably be delighted to contract with Clarkston and do a better job (it’s hard to imagine they could be worse). He hasn’t bothered to ask.

The city manager was also responsible for eight of the fourteen years of overpayments to Independence Township for police and fire services. How did it happen? The invoices were simply rubber-stamped. No one read the contract to learn how the amounts should be calculated – because they didn’t even have a copy of the contract in city hall files. When my husband discovered the issue (by reading the contract Independence Township provided to me through FOIA and reviewing tax data published on the Oakland County website), the city manager blamed Independence Township for not attaching a billing explanation. This was the lamest excuse one could imagine, but it was the only one he could think of at the time. No one asked the city manager why he didn’t pick up the phone and request billing detail if he thought he needed it. And no one asked him how that billing detail would have helped him, since he didn’t have a contract in the office to review to confirm the rates. And the city council didn’t hold the city manager or any other employee responsible for the $171,799.59 that the city overpaid. (And no, that’s not a typo.) In the end, Independence Township kept eight years of the negligent city employee overpayments because contract claims have a six-year statute of limitations – so they didn’t have to refund the money for years 1-8 and there was nothing we could do about it. Taxpayers were reimbursed only $87,301.93 of the $171,799.59, for a total refund of $96,219.57 once interest was added in. Some city council members actually defended the city manager because, after all, why would he ever think it’s a good idea to double check invoices asking for service payments that amounted to over 1/3 of the city’s budget every year. Poor guy. Everyone should stop asking him to do his job!

Do you really think the city is somehow going to be a better steward of tax dollars for police and fire service if all or part of this financial burden is specifically shifted to you in a public safety millage? Sure, they will. 😂😂😂

But why are so many cities dancing in the “public safety millage” conga line?

It’s just the latest trick public bodies are using to raise taxes because public services costs are rising, they are spending more than their regular millage rates take in, and they’d rather raise taxes than cut expenses. It allows cities, villages, and townships to shift the cost of public safety services (usually police and fire) from their general funds to a separate “public safety millage.” This means taxpayers get to pay their general property tax mills PLUS they get to pay for a shiny new “public safety millage.” Then the public bodies wash their hands of doing anything fiscally responsible with police and fire – like contracting with a new source to provide the services at a better cost or running things more efficiently if they have their own police and fire departments. And the best part for them is they get to keep the money in the general fund they would have spent on police and fire (something you want) and spend it on all their pet projects (things you probably don’t want or don’t care about).

I mentioned that we currently pay for police and fire with general fund money, but what is that? The answer is in the name. It’s kind of like fun money – the allocation of general money is flexible, and general fund budget money can be easily moved around for things like giving giant increases in salary and benefits to city employees who give us almost no city services in return, pet city council and city manager projects, etc. Calling it fun money is a little sarcastic because it does need to be accounted for and the council must approve the expenditures. But the way that works in Clarkston is the city manager asks for whatever he wants, tells the council what general fund money he’s moving around to pay for it, and the city council always rubber-stamps it – except that during the last few meetings, they’ve said no to a few low-cost items so they can posture about being fiscally responsible. After all, they’re going to ask you to pay a buttload more money in November, so they at least have to pretend they’re spending tax dollars judiciously if Clarkston wants to win that “public safety millage” lottery! No doubt the city manager has been pushing this idea because he learned about it at one of those Michigan Municipal League conferences he’s always asking Clarkston taxpayers to pay for. (And am I the only one who noticed that the city manager didn’t start whining about the supposed need for revenue increases until after he’d secured giant salary increases for himself, the clerk, and the treasurer during the 2025-2026 budget year? Priorities!)

How much money are we talking about for Clarkston police and fire services? A helluva lot. In Clarkston, police and fire is budgeted at $408,776 for the 2026-2027 fiscal year. (It’s a little hard to find these numbers, since the city hasn’t posted the current budget [approved two months ago] on its “financial transparency” website.) This is 54.86% of total property tax revenue of $745,146 and 44.24% of total revenue of $923,986. If there is a straight millage on the 2026 taxable value of both real and personal property of $66,356,250, the millage required to get half that amount would be a 3.08 mill increase. The millage to get the full current police and fire budget of $408,776 would be 6.16 mills. This would be in addition to the 11.4107 mills you’re currently paying in city taxes (a number that gets automatically adjusted every year depending on the rate of inflation and the growth in total property value in the city). That’s a 27% or 54% increase in your property tax, depending on whether the city asks for 50% or 100% of the contract cost for police and fire for its “public safety millage” (or it could be some other number they’ve been keeping secret until their upcoming big reveal). The many additional taxes on your bill are pass-throughs to other entities, like the school district, community college district, state education tax, county tax, and various other taxing entities – but it’s real money and it still hurts to pay them. (These figures are a little off because any new tax will be based on 2027 property values, which will be finalized next year.)

I explained how we’re taxed in detail here, but if you want to get a feel for what this means for you dollar-wise without all the details, you’re going to have to pull out your tax bill and find the box with the “taxable value” heading. This number likely started as the same value as the “state equalized value,” which is approximately half of the market value of your home when you purchased your home. Taxable value doesn’t rise as much as state equalized value each year because annual increases are limited to the lesser of 5% or the rate of inflation. For someone who has owned their house for several years, the taxable value will likely be significantly less than the state equalized value. Our property taxes are based on the taxable value.

I’m going to use an example of a house that is worth approximately $400,000 and assume a taxable value of half that amount, or $200,000. (This would be the case, for example, for someone who just bought the house, where the state equalized value is the same as the taxable value. In any case, the example assumes a taxable value of $200,000, which is probably not far off for many Clarkston residents.) One mill is equal to $1 of tax for each $1,000 of the taxable value number, so in this example, each 1 mill tax increase would be equal to $200 more tax per year. (I got that by multiplying $200,000 by .001.) This home would be required to pay $616.00 more per year ($200,000 x .00308) if half the cost for police and fire was shifted to taxpayers, and $1,232 more per year ($200,000 x .00616) if we’re asked to pay for 100% of the police and fire cost in a new millage. And, depending on the ballot proposal language, 100% of annual increased costs for police and fire services could be passed on to us as well in more millage.

All this is in addition to our current regular city millage rate of 11.4107, which amounts to $2,282.14 for that $400,000 house with a $200,000 taxable value. And that doesn’t include all the other taxes you pay for schools, the library, parks, the Huron Clinton Metro Authority, the zoo, the art institute, and Oakland transit. Renters are hit as well because landlords pass along their increased property taxes in the form of higher rent.

So that’s the “public safety millage” scam in a nutshell. Now do you understand why the city is so excited about this? They can’t wait to spend all those freed up general fund dollars any way they want (and you don’t get a vote on that). Cha-ching!

We don’t know exactly where the city will come out dollar-wise on the public safety millage-palooza because they’ve been super secretive, but ask yourself – are you willing to pay more per year so the city can spend general fund money (that you’re already paying now) on other things after off-loading police and fire expenses in the form of an additional “public safety millage” for you to pay? I doubt it, and that’s why our city manager wants to use your tax dollars to pay a public relations firm to run a slick campaign to convince you – to pay more taxes! Because paying more taxes is a good thing, right? Maybe he will demand another $13,000/year raise for this great idea!

Wait – we don’t have any money to provide city services to residents, but we do have money to pay for a public relations firm to polish this “public safety millage” turd to convince us to part with more of our own hard-earned money? Make it make sense!

Oh, and then there’s this. These millages are for limited periods of time and voters are asked to periodically renew them. But when they ask you for a “public safety millage” renewal, they’ll tell you that you absolutely must pass a renewal (or millage increase and renewal) or you will either no longer have police and fire services, or these services will be severely limited. Why? Because by the time the first millage expires, city officials will have spent every effing general fund dollar they formerly used to pay for police and fire on other things, just as Clarkston government used the money it saved from getting rid of our awesome police department for other things and now claims it can’t afford to pay for police and fire.

The lesson from that is this – vote “no” the first time they ask for a “public safety millage” and force the city to live within its means like you have to do.

I agree we need police and fire, but I don’t agree we need – or need to lie about – the “public safety millage.” And the city does apparently plan to lie to you because in addition to wanting to hire a public relations firm to baffle you with bullshit, it’s been taking great pains to keep the public in the dark (with the help of the city attorney!) until it decides exactly how it wants to place its pieces on the chessboard. If you’re not smart, there will be a quick checkmate against you – and that’s what they’re counting on.

They’ve been holding a lot of secret closed city council sessions purportedly to discuss city attorney opinions, and they won’t even tell you what they’re discussing – you’ll have to send a FOIA request if you want to know. These secret closed sessions are often a surprise addition to the agenda after a meeting begins, but even when the secret sessions are disclosed on the agenda, the subject of the session usually hasn’t been disclosed – the item simply states they are having a secret closed session to discuss an attorney opinion. And FYI, the first time I sent a FOIA request to find out what they were secretly discussing at all these closed sessions, the city challenged whether it even needed to give me a record that revealed what the topic was because, it argued, it doesn’t have to tell us on the agenda what the secret topic is. That’s true – and if your city officials prefer secret government, they can hide what they’re doing on the agenda – but they can’t avoid providing a record under the FOIA. (They eventually provided a record. Smart move, because I would have gone to court over that.)

What’s been happening with these secret meetings is an abuse of the Open Meetings Act’s limited exception allowing the city to meet with its attorney to discuss a legal opinion. But closed sessions aren’t required to have a discussion with its attorney. The city council can choose to have discussions in open session as they did during my FOIA lawsuit, and every lawyer knows how to have a public discussion without disclosing privileged material. But your city council wants secrets, not transparency, and the city council always agrees to every secret closed session the city attorney asks for.

Several city council members inadvertently “let the cat out of the bag” about what’s going on in these secret closed sessions concerning the “public safety millage” because their comments in the public portion of the July 27 city council meeting shows they’ve been doing more than “discussing” the city attorney’s legal opinion. They’ve been making decisions, coming to consensus, and agreeing on directions to the city attorney in these closed sessions. This is an in-your-face violation of the Open Meetings Act, which requires that ALL decisions of a public body be made through a vote in an open meeting (and the Open Meetings Act provides for civil and criminal penalties for deliberate violations). But you wouldn’t know what happens after they return to open session even if they were voting in public because our mayor established a new, recent practice of sending the Independence Television videographer home right after the secret meeting closes and telling the public they can go home because there’s going to be nothing to see when they return to open session. We should just trust a government that’s going to extraordinary lengths to hide everything it’s doing from the public.  Sure, we should. 🙄

City officials even held a secret finance committee meeting on July 6 to scheme about the way they wanted to tax us more. I say the meeting was secret because the city didn’t post the meeting on the calendar so people would be aware it was happening and could attend. And even though the city manager always sends a courtesy notice to our local finance watchdog resident Chet Pardee (because Pardee makes it a point to go to every finance committee meeting possible), the city manager just happened to forget to do it this time. I’m sure it was all a coincidence. 🙄 So weird that the city attorney attended that finance committee meeting when he doesn’t usually do that, huh? And when challenged at the July 27 city council meeting about failing to give the public any notice of the finance committee meeting, city officials lied and said the meeting was posted on the city’s calendar. It wasn’t, and I have a screenshot to prove it.

And now the story about the secret finance committee meeting has changed. On July 27, city attorney Gerry Fisher agreed that this July 6 meeting was a finance committee meeting. He’s now saying well, you know, it wasn’t really a finance committee meeting; it was just a meeting of “city administrators and consultants.” The finance committee consists of council members Al Avery and Ted Quisenberry, mayor Sue Wylie, city manager Jonathan Smith, and treasurer Greg Coté. (But don’t bother going to the website to double-check the membership because it’s not up to date and still includes Mark Lamphear who lost his election in November 2024.) Based on the comments made in the open meeting on July 27, we can infer that Avery, Quisenberry, Wylie, Smith, and city attorney Fisher were present at the meeting along with unnamed “consultants.” (I’d be surprised if Coté wasn’t also present since the meeting took place during his regular workday, but no one specifically said he was there.) So yes, there actually was a finance committee meeting. The city isn’t required to have public finance committee meetings, even though it has done so for several years in the interest of transparency. I’d be willing to bet that on the advice of the city attorney that there’s no requirement to hold public finance committee meetings, the city gave us a big middle finger and deliberately decided to keep this important meeting secret. If I had to guess, that’s why the city attorney is now saying it wasn’t just a regular finance committee meeting the city would normally post notice of – it was really a double super top-secret finance committee meeting. And that’s totally different. 🙄

To recap, the scam part of the “public safety” millage is that it’s not about public safety. It’s about freeing general fund money that is currently being used for police and fire, spending the money on something else, and shifting the burden to you to pay more taxes in an extra millage. And the city has been hiding an insane amount of discussion about it from the public.

Or at least that was the original plan. The city attorney came up with a devious and clever new plan, no doubt discussed in the secret meetings, to trick you into thinking that the “public safety millage” could be “revenue neutral.” That’s just a fancy way of saying that the overall amount of taxes you’re paying now would stay the same because the amount you send the city for general fund taxes would be reduced dollar for dollar by the amount of the “public safety millage.”

But only for now. And that’s the trojan horse. The city attorney admitted as much at the July 27 city council meeting when he said: “Basically what happens then is the authorization for the operational millage stays up. And so, if necessary, as a result of things that occur during the year, you need more money, you can authorize the levy of more of that because you have that authorization already from the charter.”

What the heck does that mean? It’s actually very slick – and truly evil – at the same time.

Our city charter, which is our constitution, authorizes the city to charge us up to 15 mills in taxes. The Michigan constitution requires the city to live within the authorized 15 mills. The reason your current general fund property tax rate is 11.4107 mills rather than 15 mills is because every year, the Headlee amendment to the Michigan constitution requires the amount of millage you pay to be “rolled back” so that the city receives the same amount of taxes each year plus the rate of inflation. This prevents taxes from automatically creeping up just because property values are increasing. Local governments hate this and complain all the time about Headlee and “Proposal A,” which is another protection the voters added to the Michigan constitution to shield homeowners against inflationary tax increases. Don’t feel sorry for the city – Headlee gives it the benefit of the 15-mill bargain that was struck with the taxpayers when they approved the charter and original millage without the windfall of giant inflationary increases. They’re just greedy and don’t like those protections, but without them, people could literally be taxed out of their homes during high inflationary periods, and the city government would shed no tears about that.

If the city wants to get 15 mills at the current dollar value, it has to ask you for what is known as a “Headlee override.” In that case, your “yes” vote would “override” the annual decreases in the authorized general fund millage rate and raise it back up to 15 mills. That would be the honest way to approach this issue, but when has the city ever been honest about finance issues? The city really doesn’t want to ask voters for a straight-up tax increase of up to a total of 15 mills (up to a 3.5893 mill increase, which is slightly more than asking you to pay for half of the cost for police and fire) because it’s afraid you’ll vote no on a straight up “please increase my taxes vote.” It’s much better to trick you and ask for a “public safety millage” because everyone loves public safety, we need public safety, and public safety is totally awesome. Huzzah!

Once it convinces you to agree to the “public safety millage” and promises to reduce your 11.4107 rate dollar for dollar in a “revenue neutral” proposal, the only thing stopping the city from raising your taxes back to 11.4107 mills is its promise that it won’t do that in the future. Yet we learned last year that city promises aren’t worth the powder to blow them to Hades. Remember the forever annual library millage rollback promise it broke last year and raised your taxes by .691 mills – without your vote – that it turned around and used to give giant increases in salaries and benefits to city employees? The “revenue neutrality” scam is the library millage on steroids. Once it gets you to agree to increased property taxes through a public safety millage and promises to reduce the general millage on a dollar-for-dollar basis, it could later raise your taxes up to those 3.08 mills (half of the police and fire cost) to 6.16 mills (all of the police and fire cost) – or whatever the “public safety millage” amount ends up being – by a simple majority vote of the council and bring us right back up to the 11.4107 rate. And we’d only have their word that they wouldn’t do it to rely on.

But we already know we cannot trust our city government. It’s proven it will make promises that it’ll keep only as long as it’s convenient. Even if the ballot proposal expressly says that it will be revenue neutral, the revenue neutrality will only last as long as council’s word is good for. The city has shown it will lie without compunction – literally! My husband is still fighting the city in court over the false claims public officials made during the city crusade to defeat the 2024 Historic District Commission charter proposal. The city’s attorney actually argued that the law allows the city to make untrue statements to the public about a ballot proposal as long as city officials avoid the phrase “vote yes” or “vote no.”

Do you really expect anyone from the city to tell you the truth when the city has so much to gain financially through a “public safety millage”? And do you really think you can believe it if it promises the “public safety millage” will be “revenue neutral” forever?

Don’t fall for it. They’ve shown their promises to be worthless.

Fool us once on the library millage promise, shame on you, city council. Fool us twice on the “public safety millage,” should not result in shame on us. Let’s vote no and not give the city the opportunity to raise our taxes without a vote ever again. If it can get around asking for your vote, it will. Why do you think there’s been so much planning in the shadows? An honest and forthright government would be open with the residents and put a Headlee override on the ballot. A sleazy government will do everything in secret, wait until the last possible minute, and then put a smarmy “public safety millage” on the ballot that will never go away and even worse, add a false “revenue neutrality” promise to the mix.

Remember – we don’t even have our own police and fire department so your “no” vote wouldn’t put city employees out of work – this is nothing more than shifting the burden for the cost of contract police and fire services from the general fund (that you already pay for) to a special “public safety millage” (that they want you to pay more for) because the city is too lazy to explore alternatives for fire and crappy police services. This is all about the city not wanting to use general fund money to pay for police and fire so it can spend it on other things – like pet projects and giving more raises and benefit increases for employees while providing virtually no citizen services.

Someone recently asked me if the city council gave a damn about people who will have more difficulty selling their homes if taxes go even higher. My answer was to take a good look at the city council. Most of them are old, have zero plans to sell, are enjoying lower taxes because they’ve likely owned their homes for a long time and any millage increase would be calculated on a lower taxable value for them, and they probably plan to die in their houses and leave the home sale problem to the people who inherit from them.

If you want to get an approximate idea what a home buyer might pay in Clarkston taxes to buy the home you own now, then look at your home’s state equalized value (not the taxable value) and multiply it by .001 for every mill for your regular city millage rate of 11.4107 plus whatever Clarkston government decides to ask for in “public safety millage.” If you want to get an idea of the overall amount of taxes your home buyer is going to be subjected to, then you need to look at your summer and winter tax bills and calculate it in the same way. Even though these other taxes aren’t controlled by Clarkston government – Clarkston only gets the current equivalent of the original 15 mills the voters agreed to (11.4107) plus whatever the city council decides you should additionally pay for in a “public safety millage” – Clarkston clearly has an impact on the total.

The city doesn’t have much time to get a proposal submitted for the November ballot, so they’ll be forced to bring their secret, shadowy proposal into the sunlight very soon. But now you have some idea what it’s about, how to calculate what’s at stake for you and your family, to ask informed questions, and to vote accordingly.

FYI, my husband and I think the Michigan campaign finance act prohibits using tax dollars to pay for public relations firms to create slick advertising campaigns in favor of tax increases. Public bodies aren’t allowed to ask you to vote one way or another on a ballot proposal, yet that’s the entire purpose for using tax dollars to pay for a public relations firm to help the city get you to vote the way it wants you to on a ballot proposal. The public relations firm will claim it is just providing “factual information” on behalf of the city and not advocating a vote for increased taxes. But it will make a one-sided “factual” presentation that doesn’t acknowledge there are two sides to the question and doesn’t include the facts discussed in this post. Maybe Clarkston will get its name in the casebooks once again because this will be a perfect test case to challenge the use of tax dollars for this crap.