McMinnville has a new policy allocating four percent of the city’s property tax revenue for donations to local non-profits.
Vice Mayor and Finance Committee Chair Steve Harvey said the city needed a guideline to monitor how many donations it makes. Harvey said the number of donations given and the number of non-profits requesting financial support have both increased in recent years.
“It’s just hard for me to justify spending someone else’s money, and it is their money, it’s the taxpayer’s money, on certain non-profits that they may or not want to donate money to,” Harvey said. “Or maybe a situation where they already give money, a lot of money to some of these organizations and then we’re telling them they’re now giving even more.”
Harvey said the city will continue to donate to specific non-profits connected to the city like the Library and Chamber of Commerce. Harvey said the city has yet to see any applications for donations under the new system so it is difficult to predict how other non-profits will be impacted.
“It will encourage them to do more fundraising on their own, that’s for sure,” Harvey said. “I don’t know that that’s necessarily a good thing for them, but that’s just kind of our path we’ve taken in trying to be better stewards of the citizens money that we’re spending.”
Harvey said having this policy will not only limit spending but help the city be more intentional about the non-profits that it does want to support. Harvey said all the non-profits in the area do great work and are great at what they do, but he has always been bothered by donating to non-profits outside of the city’s main items with taxpayer money.
“Every year going into budget time we didn’t know whether we’d spend two percent of our tax revenue or twelve percent of our tax revenue on non-profits,” Harvey said. “And we need to have some sort of range in mind ahead of time with a goal instead of just blindly voting on each individual non-profit.”
