Port: Fargo could save some money by acknowledging it is, in fact, part of North Dakota

MINOT — Fargo’s spend-happy city government has run up

massive financial deficits,

and yet, as the tide of COVID-era federal funding recedes, the city is still plotting a course for eye-watering spending increases.

The shortfalls were $7.5 million and $7.9 million in 2021 and 2022, respectively, and the city’s

been emptying out its savings

to stay in the black, but that hasn’t prompted much of a reaction from city leaders. Mayor Tim Mahoney is full-speed ahead with his budget for 2024, charting a course for

a 7.5% or $11.3 million budget increase.

The mayor plans to pay for this with a property tax hike, at a time when a new constitutional amendment to abolish property taxes

seems likely to be on the ballot next year,

and an increase in the city’s franchise fees for public utilities which will show up in the bills Fargo citizens pay.

Meanwhile, we aren’t hearing much about spending cuts. “Where are the signs that the city has worked to reduce costs?”

the Forum of Fargo-Moorhead asked in an editorial.

Perhaps now is the time for Fargo to end its legal crusade against the state Legislature.

I’m talking about the

recently-initiated litigation

over home-based firearms transactions. Remotely-purchased firearms can’t be shipped directly to you. One must work through someone local who has a federal firearms license for background checks and other paperwork.

These license holders often conduct the transactions in their homes, with the purchasers picking up their merchandise.

For years these transactions

weren’t causing anybody any problems.

There were no complaints to law enforcement. The city of Fargo wasn’t even enforcing its ordinances which proscribe that sort of commerce in residential areas. But once these transactions got on the radar of Fargo’s city commission, the current iteration of which spends a lot of its time pandering to the pieties of left-wing politics, the city decided to crack down.

That prompted the Legislature to act, seeking to protect the transactions. Fargo’s leaders, subscribing to the absurd legal theory that the city can pick and choose which state laws it follows, sued.

“In 2022, Eric Johnson, the former city attorney, told city commissioners that the ‘home rule mandate’ that allows counties and cities to establish local power supersedes any state law within the city limits,”

C.S. Hagen reported in June.

A judge handed a victory to Fargo in the first round of squabbling, though not for the city’s dumb belief that it doesn’t have to follow state laws if it doesn’t want to. The judge said

the state law was too ambiguous.

The judge got it wrong, but that’s water under the bridge. Lawmakers tightened up the wording earlier this year. Fargo is unlikely to win this legal argument again.

Maybe they should stop trying. Not just from a legal point of view — Fargo is and always has been a political subdivision of the state of North Dakota — but from a fiscal point of view.

Fargo’s citizens shouldn’t be burdened with tax bills from the fruitless legal crusades inspired by the left-wing proclivities of their municipal leaders.