John Haack Commentary

John Haack, Maple Lake Councilor

The City Council of any city gets lots of requests for money and there are always considerations. Is it to be a tone-time contribution, is it beneficial to the business community and/or more importantly, to our taxpaying residents? Is it in our budget and will it affect our upcoming tax rate?

The question came up at our last council meeting. The organizer of Maple Lake Makers and Growers, who approached the Council last year for a “one time donation” to get this event up and going for our city, clearly stated she would not be back this year for more money. That turned out to not be the case. She was back seeking a voluntary sponsorship like she was seeking from community businesses. She went on to cite how successful the event had been, “…70 vendors some days,” which drove home the point her goal of making the event self-supporting was indeed a reality. However, she stated they couldn’t charge the vendors set up fees like we do in flea markets because they didn’t have enough volunteers to designate one, to be in charge of registration AND a setup fee collection too. I found this argument to be about as inappopriate as my view of her coming back to us for more money this season.

It was a struggle to get our taxes down from 19% to 5% this year (see my last commentary). It was my understanding our council was in agreement that we needed to cut expenses so as not to have to draw from our reserves, to keep taxes tolerable. Policing and legal expenses for our community are at an all- time high. Imagine, we spend in a year around $90,000 for legal fees compared with Annandale spending less than $30,000. In spite of my motion to NOT help fund makers and growers once again, I couldn’t even get a second to my motion. Just another day of trying to understand happenings on the Maple Lake City Council, after being confronted by a fellow councilor regarding my last commentary, which she stated was full of untruthful information. She was set straight on that by our city administrator stating there was nothing in it that was “untruthful” but than again, the complaining councilor had stated she only read the first couple lines of that commentary, immediately determining “…it made us look bad.”