Greater Des Moines · Tax Increment Financing
Every dollar of captured increment is either rebated to a developer or retained by the city for infrastructure, land and TIF debt. The split is a policy choice, and it varies enormously.
Click any column to sort. Dollar figures are FY2012–2024 totals.
| City | UR areas | Increment generated | To developers | Retained by city | City property tax | TIF as % of that | Increment growth | Gen. fund rate | Exposure |
|---|
The headroom above measures one route by which the 2026 law squeezes a city. Officials are acting on a different one, which the levy rate cannot show.
How the cap actually bites. Senate File 2472, signed in May 2026, caps general-fund revenue growth at 2% from FY2028. Debt service, employee benefits, insurance and law-enforcement levies sit outside it. Crucially, new construction is exempt — that exemption is the escape valve which lets a growing city add revenue above the cap.
What changed for TIF and abatement. The law also alters the valuation definition so that property under tax abatement no longer counts as new construction when the abatement expires. That partly closes the escape valve: value a city expected to arrive cap-free instead lands inside the 2% limit. It is why cities are suspending incentive tools rather than simply trimming budgets, and it takes effect 1 January 2027.
What cities have already done — actions on the public record, not projections:
Why there is no ranking for this channel. Exposure here depends on how much abated value each city has rolling back onto the rolls, and Iowa publishes no statewide dataset of abatement value by city — applications are held by county assessors. The Polk assessor file records exempt value but does not separate abatement from church, government and rollback reductions, so any "abatement exposure" league table would be an invention. The mechanism is documented above; the per-city magnitude is not publicly quantifiable, and is a fair question to put to each city's finance director.