Welcome back. This is part 2 of my Q & A on the “public safety” millage. I thought it would be a fun exercise to do a Q & A using our city officials’ own words from the August 10, 2026, city council meeting when they voted to put a “public safety” millage proposal on the ballot that will – not might – raise your overall Clarkston taxes by 62% to 18.4107 mills within the next five years (or sooner) along with my own commentary.
The quotes and public official commentary in this post were taken from the informal transcript that I prepare after city council meetings and publish on the Clarkston Sunshine website. It’s close to a verbatim transcript but I’m not a court reporter and don’t certify my transcripts as official. You can listen to a recording of the August 10, 2026, city council discussion about the “public safety” millage by clicking here and I encourage everyone to do so. If you notice an error in the statements I’ve attributed to any city official, please let me know and I’ll correct it.
One additional note – the city council jumped around when talking about what this 7-mill tax increase means. I’m letting you know upfront that I’ve moved what was said to the applicable sections below, so for example, one comment could have been made ten minutes apart from a later or earlier one. If you want to hear the discussion as it occurred in sequence and context, I encourage you to listen to the meeting recording.
(One housekeeping comment for my email subscribers. The first sentence in the fourth paragraph of Part 1 should have read “raise your overall Clarkston taxes by 62% to 18.4107 mills . . . ” rather than “raise your general operating taxes by 62% to 11.4107 mills . . . ”)
Here are all the questions I’ll be answering in my Q & A, but due to the overall length, I’ll be posting it in three parts. The questions covered in this post are in the darker blue. You can find Part 1 here.
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- What is a “public safety” millage?
- How do we pay for police, fire, and EMS now?
- How much of a millage tax increase is Clarkston proposing?
- Does the city really expect me to pay 7 mills more for bad police service?
- Did the city explore less expensive alternatives for police, fire, and EMS?
- The city says if I vote “yes,” my taxes will only increase by 1 mill, not 7 mills – what’s true?
- Why won’t the city make a firm promise to keep the tax increase to 1 mill for the next budget year?
- How did the city decide it needed 7 mills for “public safety”?
- The city promises there will be a public hearing before it raises our taxes, so that’s helpful, right?
- What happens if we vote “no” on the “public safety” millage?
- In conclusion . . .
And here is Part 2:
Question – Did the city explore less expensive alternatives for police, fire, and EMS?
In a word – no.
Councilmember Amanda Forte: “Did we ever look into what it would look like if we worked with Lake Orion or worked with another municipality?”
Mayor Sue Wylie: “Yeah, it’s been looked at.”
Councilmember Avery: “Yeah, the only way we’d be able to do something different would be to create a regional police unit.”
Councilmember Quisenberry: “There were comparisons if you look at other, small communities like ours that have their own police department . . . yeah, so it’s very expensive, especially if you’re going to have to start it up. Start it up, add another 40% onto that.”
City attorney Gerry Fisher: “And there’s a question of quality.”
Avery suggested that paying 7 mills more in taxes is better than going broke or not or having some “second-rate” fire service or police service. Pretty sure we have second-rate police service right now. And did you notice serious cost-cutting is never on the table for these people?
So, all they did was talk and only about two options. Establishing a regional police unit (something we couldn’t do on our own) or starting up our own police department – again.
But Forte’s question was whether anyone had looked into working with another municipality that already has its own police department, for example, Waterford Township. And the answer clearly was they did not, even though these other communities are hurting for money to fund their police services and might welcome an influx of cash to handle our half square mile, low crime city – and may even charge less money to do it. But we don’t know the answer to that because no one has asked the question.
In fact, our city manager is apparently unaware that other cities have their own police departments that we might be able to contract with. Here’s what he said at the May 27, 2025, city council meeting: “There are really no options here as far as police coverage at this time. Will somebody come forward, a community come forward and decide to build their own internal police department and we could piggyback on them? I guess that’s a possibility down the road, but right now the Oakland County Sheriff is really the only game in town.”
“The only game in town”? I guess all those marked police cars we see when we drive around in the community from other local cities are figments of our imagination. 🙄
So, other than lip service about two impossibilities – starting up our own police department again or creating a “regional” police department – the answer to the question is your city government spent its time exploring how much of a millage it wanted but not whether we could get better services somewhere else for less money.
Question – The city says if I vote “yes,” my taxes will only increase by 1 mill, not 7 mills – what’s true?
The city wants you to vote to allow the city council to increase your taxes up to 7 mills. And the difference between an “authorization” and a “levy” is what makes this proposal truly evil by its nature, why Smith is trying to sell this to you as “only” a 1-mill tax increase, and why he claims that a “yes” vote on the 7 mill “public safety” millage will cost the owners of the home with a $160,000 taxable value “only” $160 more per year ($160,000 X .001 = $160). Such a deal, right?
Friends, this is not about a 1-mill tax increase. It’s about a 7-mill tax increase that could happen as early as next June or in dribs and drabs during the next couple of budget years.
The 1-mill “Smith myth” is just a city con to try to entice you to vote “yes” to tax yourself 7 mills more. And in exchange, they are kind of, sort of, maybe reducing your 11.4107 general millage almost dollar-for-dollar (but only for next year’s budget) by telling you in the resolution that accompanied the ballot proposal that they hope to temporarily reduce your 11.4107 general property taxes by 6 mills to 5.4107 mills, giving themselves a net 1-mill increase next budget year. (FYI, they’re always free to charge you less than the maximum millage rate but they can’t charge you more.)
But if you vote “yes,” you’ve consented to authorizing a total general property tax millage of 11.4107 plus a “public safety” millage of 7 mills for a total of 18.4107 mills (about a 62% overall increase in your Clarkston property taxes).
I described how this works in my last post by using a hypothetical cookie jar that contains tax millage dollars. If you vote “yes” on the “public safety” proposal, you are handing the city council a cookie jar containing 18.4107 mills. For now, they are kind of, sort of, maybe promising to remove only 12.4107 mills from the cookie jar (7 mills in “public safety” millage money and 5.4107 mills general millage money for a net increase of 1 mill).
But notice what Fisher said during the meeting (“what we’re talking about is the authorization that the people are approving is for seven mills. . . . in the first year or second year, there’s no obligation to levy the whole thing. . . .”) Got it? He’s suggesting your taxes will go up by the whole 7 mills within three years when he says after the “first or second year.” What might they do next budget year? Or the year after? Or the year after that? We don’t even know what they’re going to do with their newfound ability to raise our taxes next June because they won’t commit to anything.
Temporarily reducing the 11.4107 to entice you to vote “yes” on the “public safety” millage is just a worm dangling on the end of the fishing line – and you’re the fish.
Don’t bite. You’re not getting a tax decrease – it’s a net increase. The tax increase coming next July 1 is probably going to be more than 1 mill. And when you listen to the comments the city council members made during the August 10, 2026, meeting, it’s obvious they all know it’s true.
In talking about their authority to take millage money from the tax millage cookie jar effective next July 1 (or at any time thereafter):
Mayor pro tem Laura Rodgers: “So, you can do 5 mills?”
Fisher: “You can do 5 mills.”
Avery: “Right.”
Forte: “You can go down, but you don’t have to go all the way up to 7.”
Avery: “Well, we can do, right. . . . We’re just authorizing us the ability.”
That’s right. If you vote “yes” on the “public safety” millage, you are giving the city council the ability to raise your taxes the entire 7-mill amount, which will increase the total city millage you pay to a whopping 18.4107 mills (about a 62% increase).
Quisenberry: “But it gives us some leeway a year or two down the road. If we need to, we can do something with the operating.” (By “operating,” Quisenberry means increasing that 5.4107 mills closer to the authorized 11.4107 mills.)
Avery: “So, as I understand it, we have 11.4 that we can levy for the operational expenses of the city. Since we’re essentially creating a new tax that falls outside of the operational, that’s different. That doesn’t count against the 11.4 . . . yeah, in theory we could do 11.4, 7, and be 18. Yes, but that’s not, I don’t think anybody is thinking that’s where that’s gonna go.”
Well, Mr. Avery, if you don’t think “that’s where that’s gonna go,” then why are you asking for 7-mill authority? Stop the B.S. – we all know it’s “gonna go” up 7 mills within the next 5 years (and likely sooner).
Resident #1: “If, in fact, the proposal is approved in November, then we’ve really got up to 18, so we could really, with the council’s approval, they can decide that we just don’t need to do 1, that we could do 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, be it up to 18, isn’t it the new number become?”
Fisher: “So, if the public approves the 7, if the public approves the 7, and we already have 11.4, so then it becomes the total authorization, not the amount that we’ve decided to levy, but the total authorization is 18.4.”
Resident #1: “What it is that the law permits.”
Avery: “Absolutely, and you’re right.”
Mayor pro tem Rodgers: “You’re right.”
Wylie: “You’re right.”
Resident #2: “Oh, yeah, I think you’re likely to blow through all of this well before 2031” (when the “public safety” millage would be up for renewal).
Avery: “Yes.”
Remember what mayor Sue Wylie said when she raised our taxes by .691 mills? She said their backs “were against the wall” – leaving her no choice except to vote “yes” to raise our taxes so the city could start offering health insurance and give giant raises to three of the six city employees. Every city council member voted to raise your taxes for these unnecessary salary and benefit raises – what makes you think they’ll act differently as they vote to raise your taxes up to the entire 7 mills to pay for the cost of police, fire, and EMS services they predict will rise each year? Various council members mentioned that their own taxes would be increased by the “public safety” millage as well everyone else’s as though that’s some sort of firewall to prevent it from happening, but increasing taxes on themselves wasn’t a barrier when they raised taxes by .691 mills.
Fair or not, the best predictor of what someone will do in the future is to look at what they’ve done in the past. Clarkston city council has never restrained itself when there’s a pot of money available for the taking. It eventually will grab it all because it always convinces itself that a want is a need.
Here are two examples.
The city council “borrowed” hundreds of thousands of dollars from the water and sewer funds to create a new and improved city hall and Department of Public Works (DPW) expansion (that included a private office for the city manager). These funds existed only because residents are forced to pay a bit more than the actual cost of water and sewer services with each bill and that extra money is earmarked for water and sewer repair. Despite residents mounting a city-wide sign campaign and petition drive telling the city council they did not want their water and sewer reserve funds used to rebuild city hall and expand the DPW, the city council took the money anyway – even though the cost to repair the building was estimated to be less than $50,000. Repairing the building was a need; spending around $400,000 to rebuild city hall and DPW and create a private office space for Smith was a want. Wondering why you keep seeing endless additional charges on your sewer bills? It’s because the city finds itself in need of cash to pay for sewer repairs and the money isn’t there. And the city is taking a bit more off the top because it wants to build the sewer repair fund up again – but nothing is stopping it from “borrowing” from the fund in the future over residents’ objections.
The moral of the water and sewer fund story is that council really does not care how much you object to it spending your money in ways you don’t want it spent.
And then there’s the .691 annual library millage tax rollback I referred to earlier. That was based on a city council promise made in a resolution that our taxes would always be rolled back by .691 mills if we voted “yes” on a proposal to establish a separate district library with the ability to raise its own funds. We voted “yes” and we’re taxed by the library in a separate millage now. That .691 library millage rollback promise lasted only ten years and was easily broken last year at Smith’s request. Why? To give big raises and benefits primarily to treasurer Greg Coté, clerk Angela Guillen, and oh yes, to Smith who threatened to quit if the council didn’t give him $13,000 more per year. To use my earlier example, that .691 mills was just sitting there in a tax millage cookie jar. The city council had the authorization to increase our taxes by .691 mills and the only thing stopping it from doing that was a city council promise in a resolution.
Want to know the dollar value of the city council’s integrity? It’s .691 mills. To add insult to injury, councilmember Gary Casey had the effing nerve to say that the ability to keep the promised .691 mills of our own money to buy groceries for our families was a “gift” from the city – and he smugly thought it was time to take that gift back. That’s the type of person who sits on your city council right now.
The moral of the .691 library millage rollback story is that you cannot trust a promise from the city council made in a resolution because it can be revoked by a future city council resolution. The only way to force the council to keep a promise is a vote to put the promise in the charter.
Repeat after me – city council promises made in resolutions are worthless. Only suckers trust the word of the Clarkston city council.
Parts 3 will follow in a separate post.
Please vote “no” on the “public safety” millage proposal.