Ask Mr. Answer Person: "Where does the money go from our property tax bill?"

(David asks Mr. Answer Person: "When we pay our property tax bill, where does that money go?  What share of the money do all the local governments get—city, county, school district, etc.?")

Mr. Answer Person says: "Your question is certainly timely, since the Decorah City Council has just approved a new budget, Winneshiek County supervisors are holding a public hearing on their budget Monday and the Decorah School Board will get their first look Monday at a proposed 2014-2015 school district budget."

Let's answer this question first by discussing property in the City of Decorah.  If you own property in Decorah, this year you paid just under $36.80 in property taxes for every $1,000 of assessed value your property had.  Of that amount, $15.69 went to the Decorah School District.  That means just under 43 cents out of every $1.00 of your property tax bill went to the school district.

The next highest portion of your property tax bill is the $12.54 levy for city government.  That works out to 34 cents on the dollar.  County government takes $6.55 cents from every property tax dollar collected in Decorah—or 18 cents on the dollar.  All the other governmental organizations, including NICC and Winneshiek Medical Center, take a combined $2.02 of every $1,000 of assessed valuation—or just five percent.

There's another way to answer your question, which is to look at all the property taxes collected in Winneshiek County.  Because this includes property outside of city boundaries, the percentage of property tax money going to city government is lower.  According to information that county supervisor Dean Thompson will present at Monday's county budget hearing, nearly $30 million in property taxes were collected this year in Winneshiek County.  Of that total $15 million--50 percent--went to school districts.  26 percent went to pay for county government, 16 percent to the eight city governments in Winneshiek County and the rest to all other governmental organizations.

So to recap, whether you look at property tax collections only in the City of Decorah or over all of Winneshiek County, your property tax money goes primarily to your local school district, with city government and county government also using property taxes, but every other governmental organization making pretty minor use of property taxes.