By Dave Baumeister
County Correspondent
SIOUX FALLS – When the Minnehaha County Commission met on Tuesday, Sept. 24, the meeting room was mostly filled with supporters of county auditor Leah Anderson.
Although there was nothing on the agenda specifically regarding the auditor’s office, people showed solidarity with her over a call for her resignation made by Commissioner Joe Kippley on Sept. 10.
And Kippley’s call came as a result of a claim Anderson made in June when she alleged 24,500 ballots from the 2020 General Election were missing in the totals.
In June, though, she did state she needed time to do more work to ascertain what happened; however, she still sent out a media release a few days before that June meeting making the same 24,500 ballot claim.
On Sept. 3 – almost three months after Anderson made that initial claim, Kippley asked that she be put on the Sept. 10 agenda to explain what she had learned.
It was at that following meeting that Anderson did say that the 24,500 “discrepancy” had been cleared up so that she felt “comfortable” with the totals.
After she explained her findings, Kippley asked Anderson if she had any “regrets” about making her incomplete findings public.
The call for her resignation then came after she said she wouldn’t have done anything differently.
Kippley later stated that it was her response to his question which led him to suggest that Anderson resign her position.
One of the public commentors at the Sept. 24 meeting did imply that silence from the other commissioners after Kippley’s remarks meant that they all agreed with him. But the facts that no one said anything at the time in support of Kippley, either, and that the 2025 budget was adopted without the addition of more funds for litigations, as Kippley suggested, could just as likely, if not more likely, mean that the others did not agree with him.
The same commentor also used the example of a previous home-rule charter briefing as a testimony the commission wanted to get rid of Anderson, but in that case, the only thing that ever happened from that original briefing, was commissioners chose not to pursue it.
(That proposal called for the elimination of the elected county auditor, treasurer and register of deeds in favor of one appointed county finance officer.)
Even if something about home rule had come to a vote, that would have just been to put it on the ballot, as only the county voters, and not county commissioners, can adopt that form of government.
FY2025 budget
As the last meeting in September is when the state says budgets for the next year must be in place, commissioners unanimously passed the approximately $131 million proposal for next year.
While this budget is a major reduction from the 2024 figure, the main take-away from Tuesday was that, once again, the tax levies were going down.
While it is considered normal to complain about taxes being too high, increases in property taxes have come from increases in property values, and not in increases in how the county charges people.
Finance Officer Susan Beaman provided figures that the county mill levies have gone down eight of the 11 years since 2015. In that time, the tax levy has gone from $3.424 per $1,000 of assessed value to $2.97 (there were slight upticks of 9-cents in 2018 and 5-cents in 2020).
But, basically, as Minnehaha County Director of Equalization Chris Lilla said in the past: “Don’t blame the county if your assessed value is going up, blame your neighbor!”
The next county commission meeting will be at 9 a.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 1, in the third-floor meeting room of the Minnehaha County Administration Building at 6th and Minnesota in Sioux Falls.
