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Middle Republican NRD
The Middle Republican Natural Resources District proposed tax rate will be a half-cent lower than last year's.
A budget hearing will be Tuesday, 7:30 p.m., at the Community Center in Curtis, followed by the regular MRNRD meeting.
After the budget hearing, the board will consider at its regular meeting whether to adopt the budget or to make revisions.
This year's property tax request is 0.058525 and generate $1.03 million in property taxes for the general fund, about $700,000 less from last year's rate at 0.101604 or $1.79 million in property taxes.
This does not include property and occupation taxes collected under LB 701.
Total disbursements and transfers for 2008-09 will generate a budget totaling $5 million. Last year's actual disbursements and transfers came to $3.5 million.
But the $5 million may not all be used, according to Dan Smith, MRNRD general manager.
That's because the $5 million includes LB701 property and occupation taxes totaling $2.5 million, along with money for the Texaco Trust fund that concerns water quality south of Trenton, Smith said, funds that may or may not be spent next year.
Taxes collected under LB701 are still in limbo and Smith said the NRDs cannot use them until further direction from the Nebraska Supreme Court.
An appeal has been filed in the Nebraska Supreme Court by the State of Nebraska, in response to a successful lawsuit filed by nine property owners that challenged the constitutionality of the taxes collected under LB701. A District Court judge in Lancaster County agreed with one of the arguments presented in the lawsuit, that the taxes were unconstitutional as it created "closed class," taxes that were paid only by a portion of the state's taxpayers, those in the Republican River Basin.
The taxes collected under LB701 were to be used to pay off a loan that the NRD's planned to secure to pay irrigators for use of their water. Irrigators sold their water to the NRDs in 2007 and the water was sent to Kansas. But the loan company could not issue the bond because of the then-pending lawsuit.
LB1094 was passed by the Nebraska Legislature in 2008, that allowed NRDs to borrow $9 million to make water lease payments to those irrigators who sold their water.
NRDs have until 2013 to pay back the funds.
That money was to be paid back by LB 701 taxes, said Smith, but those taxes are not being disbursed pending the decision of the Nebraska Supreme Court.