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Lehi raises taxes for first time in over 20 years

By Ashtyn Asay - | Aug 18, 2022

Isaac Hale, Daily Herald file photo

Traffic flows along Interstate 15 at Thanksgiving Point in Lehi on Monday, April 6, 2020.

The Lehi City Council unanimously approved a resolution on Tuesday to increase taxes for the first time in over 20 years.

A public hearing and vote on the controversial resolution took place during a special city council meeting held at the Lehi City Hall. While Lehi’s certified tax rate for 2021 was .001429, the newly approved certified tax rate for 2022 will be .001189 with a projected revenue increase of $390,000.

“There were a lot of sleepless nights, but at the end of the day if we can’t get the bills paid we can’t get the services that we need, and these are essential,” Councilwoman Paige Albrecht said.

According to a presentation given by Dean Lundell, finance director for Lehi City, revenue from this tax increase will help the city keep up with rising inflation and go toward hiring additional police officers for the Lehi City Police Department.

“We’re at the point now where if Chief Paul loses a police officer, replacing that police officer is hard and might take years,” Lundell said. “You lose an experienced police officer, you hire someone new, it could take years to get that experience back.”

According to Mayor Mark Johnson, the city has struggled to maintain its facilities in recent years due to financial constraints which could be eased by the tax increase.

“I know a lot of people think we’re spending money unnecessarily here, but if you look at our facilities … we’ve made do for an awfully long time,” he said. “The library happens to be a building where we have a lot of failures, and we’re just at the point where we need to do something new.”

During the public comment portion of the meeting, required by Utah’s Truth in Taxation process, multiple residents expressed concern about the potential effects the tax increase could have on senior citizens living on fixed incomes.

Albrecht stated that the council has not taken the decision to increase taxes lightly and shared her own experience of having a child living on a fixed income.

“There are people on fixed incomes, my middle son is almost 22 and he has special needs, he can’t read or write, and he is on a fixed income that really doesn’t come close to covering what his needs are each month,” she said. “So I understand the concerns about that, but I also want to make sure that the next time he has a seizure that the ambulance will get there quickly and that we have enough police officers to take care of needs like that.”

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