Keep the Cap! Vote NO on Proposal One.
For forty five years, one line in the Saginaw city charter has held city government to $3.8 million in general operating property tax. Proposal One erases it.
The city says it is starving. The county's own certified millage records say otherwise.
Saginaw property owners already pay 18.44 mills of taxes levied entirely outside the cap, plus a 1.5 percent city income tax, plus a $250 flat trash assessment. The cap does not starve the city. It restrains it.
Repealing it raises your operating millage from 6.3365 to as high as 7.3830 immediately, with no further vote of the people, and buys you nothing.
Not one additional police officer. Not one additional pothole. Not one additional blighted lot cleared.
We have been here before
Voters imposed the cap in 1979. City government has tried to repeal it seven times since. Voters said no seven times. This is the eighth attempt, and this time it arrives with professional mailers, consultants, and a budget.
WHAT IT COSTS YOU
The First Year
Proposal One removes the $3.8 million ceiling. The moment it does, City Council gains legal authority to raise the operating rate from 6.3365 mills to 7.3830 mills, an increase of more than 16 percent, without returning to the voters.
Some officials have suggested any increase would be phased in gradually. Perhaps. Perhaps not. But Proposal One removes the only structural limit that would stop them from going to the full Headlee maximum in the very next budget cycle. Don't bet your paycheck on them.
What you get for it
Nothing new.
The police are already funded by a dedicated 7.5-mill levy that sits outside the cap. Streets, blight, and basic services are already paid for. Proposal One attaches no new service, no new position, and no new obligation to the money it unlocks. It unlocks the money and stops there.
WHAT YOU ALREADY PAY
The Number the City Shows You Is a Fraction
The Vote Yes campaign points to the city's suppressed operating rate of 6.3365 mills and asks how anyone could run a city on so little.
It is a fair question about a misleading number. That rate is a curated slice of what Saginaw property owners actually pay. Every figure below comes from one certified public document: the Saginaw County Equalization Department 2024 Millage Rate Report, certified March 28, 2025.
Levied outside the 1979 cap
City Police Levy: 7.5000 mills. Designated in the certified report as "Police, on Real Property only." Voted, dedicated, and entirely outside the cap. The campaign's central emotional appeal is that public safety will wither without repeal. Public safety already has its own levy.
Saginaw Transit Authority (STARS): 3.2000 mills. Buses were spun out of the general fund and billed to you separately.
Public Libraries of Saginaw: 3.9947 mills. Charter and voted combined. Spun out and billed separately.
County Roads: 2.0000 mills. Approved 2024. A premium charge for infrastructure foundational taxes should already cover.
County Sheriff Service: 1.7473 mills. Paid by city residents who rely primarily on the Saginaw Police Department, which they fund at 7.5 mills.
Total: 18.44 mills levied outside the cap, nearly three times the operating rate the city complains about, before the general fund collects its first dollar.
Plus the flat trash fee: $250 per household, per year
Garbage collection is the most basic municipal duty there is, the first thing a general operating millage should cover. Saginaw took it out of the general fund and imposed a flat annual assessment instead.
Because it is called a fee and not a tax, it bypasses the 1979 cap and the Headlee limit both. A $20,000 fixer-upper and a $300,000 historic-district home pay the identical $250. The burden falls hardest on the households least able to carry it.
Plus the income tax
Saginaw's 1.5 percent city income tax was raised by 50 percent in 1989 without a vote of the people. It supplies roughly 35 percent of general fund revenue and it grows with inflation automatically.
When the city says it is living on 1978 dollars, this is the revenue stream it leaves out of the sentence.
The pattern
Every time the city reached the $3.8 million ceiling, it did not tighten its belt. It spun a service out of the general budget, created an authority or an assessment, and taxed you again for the same service.
Saginaw is not starved of revenue. It is awash in revenue collected through channels most residents have never had explained to them.
RENTERS
The Cap Is Holding Your Rent Down. You Were Never Told.
Saginaw has a high concentration of rental housing. Property taxes are an operating cost of rental housing, and operating costs flow into rent. That is not a theory, it is arithmetic.
The shock absorber
Here is the part almost no one in Saginaw has been told, and the part Proposal One destroys.
The 1979 cap is a dollar cap, not a rate cap. The city may not collect more than $3.8 million in general operating property tax regardless of what property values do. So when uncapping events and rising assessments swell the city's total taxable value, the cap automatically forces the operating rate down for every property in the city.
That is why the county's 2024 report lists the operating rate at 6.7368 mills while today's rate is 6.3365. The rate fell. The cap made it fall.
The shrinking rate the city complains about is the cap doing exactly what voters built it to do: converting a growing tax base into automatic rate relief for everyone who owns or rents in this city.
What repeal does
Proposal One converts an automatic rate-relief mechanism into a permanent rate-maximization mechanism.
Homeowners lose the quiet annual relief the cap has been delivering. Landlords lose it too, and landlord costs become rent. Renters lose the only structural force in the entire tax system pushing back against the upward pressure of uncapping.
A yes vote funds no new service. It guarantees that every future dollar of growth in Saginaw's tax base is captured by City Hall instead of returned to the people who live here.
THE RECORD
Consider Who Is Asking
Before handing over the last financial limit in the charter, look at the conduct of the institution requesting it.
Public records stonewalling
Try to verify how the city spends its general fund, or how this repeal campaign is being coordinated internally, and you will meet a documented pattern:
Inflated cost estimates. Hundreds or thousands of dollars quoted to review a handful of financial emails. The price is the point.
Stacked delay extensions. Statutory extensions laid end to end until the information is no longer politically relevant.
Heavy redaction. The context and substance the public is legally entitled to see, removed.
Narrow readings of "public record." Bad-faith interpretations deployed to shield internal communications and embarrassing failures.
When the real decisions are shaped before the public meeting begins, the meeting is theater and the business of Saginaw is conducted out of view.
The $288,958 appropriation
A sitting member of Saginaw City Council put her objection in writing:
"This past Monday, Saginaw City Council voted 7 to 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 funds went to United Way of Saginaw, which disburses them at its own discretion without city oversight.
Service delivery
The city seeks a permanent property tax expansion while potholes swallow tires, blight remediation waits for complaints loud enough to force a response, and economic development means multi-year abatements for connected and out-of-state developers while working-class residents pay full price for crumbling infrastructure.
Ojibway Island remains mismanaged, with common-sense requests for vehicular access ignored while federal relief funds went to surveillance towers.
THE SOURCES
Check It Yourself
Nothing on this site asks you to take our word for it.
Saginaw County Equalization Department, 2024 Millage Rate Report, certified March 28, 2025. Source for every millage figure on this site, including the 7.5-mill police levy, the 3.2000-mill transit levy, the 3.9947 mills of library levies, the 2.0000-mill county road levy, and the 1.7473-mill sheriff levy.
City of Saginaw Charter, 1979 property tax limitation provision.
City of Saginaw adopted budget, current fiscal year, for income tax revenue as a share of general fund.
Saginaw County Treasurer tax bill records, for the annual solid waste assessment.
Do Not Hand Over the Keys
A government that obstructs records requests. A government that pleads poverty on public safety while collecting a dedicated 7.5-mill police levy outside the cap. A government already drawing on a 1.5 percent income tax, a regressive flat trash fee, and 18.44 mills of spin-off authorities and county levies.
That government now asks you to surrender the only financial protection you have left, a protection the county's own certified records show is delivering rate relief to every property owner and renter in Saginaw right now.
Protect your home equity. Protect your rent. Protect your neighbors.