The Hawk Eye
Des Moines County may stop allowing comments on any county-operated Facebook pages rather than deal with the headaches that come with running the platform. If it is informational, we do not need to have comments, county attorney Lisa Schaefer said Wednesday during a meeting with county supervisors and department heads regarding portions of the county s new employee handbook.
If a government entity operates a platform that allows for open comments, it is considered to be an open forum in which members of the public can express their opinions.
When it comes to social media use, government officials still are required to abide by the First Amendment just as they would in any public forum. This imposes a number of restrictions on government pages including that the government cannot remove comments unless they clearly are not protected by free speech, such as direct threats.
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and these dollars must be used for urban renewal purposes.
This is done by capping the value of projects in relation to normal property tax dollars. From there, any property tax dollars generated by an increase in valuation go into a special account designated by the city.
As a result, the county must set its property taxes higher because it does not receive tax paid on the full value of properties in its domain. Instead, it receives taxes paid only on the non-TIF value of the properties.
However, the county can circumvent this slightly by paying for expenses through its Debt Service Levy. Taxes paid through the Debt Service Levy are not subjected to the same rules as TIF as other levies paid for by property owners. Therefore, the county can tax the full value of property under its domain, thereby charging a lower rate than it would have had it paid for the item through the General Service Levy.