Des Moines’ PILOT program: the pledge, the pause, and the 2026 request

A property can be legally exempt and still make a voluntary payment to local government. Those arrangements are commonly called PILOTs — payments in lieu of taxes. They do not change a property’s exempt status. They are negotiated contributions for public services an institution uses but does not support through an ordinary property-tax bill.

Des Moines has had a voluntary PILOT program since 1998. According to Axios Des Moines, hospitals once pledged $860,000 annually to the city, but no hospital made a PILOT contribution in the five fiscal years preceding July 2026.1

That history matters because the two largest exempt parcels in this database are hospitals: Central Iowa Hospital Corp’s 1200 Pleasant Street parcel at $273.7 million, and Mercy Hospital Medical Center’s 1111 6th Avenue parcel at $227 million in net exempt value.2

The connection is factual. The conclusion is the reader’s.

Who did pay?

For the fiscal year ending in June 2026, Axios reported the following voluntary contributions:1

Those entities are not interchangeable. Their legal structures, revenue models, assets, and relationships with the City differ. The table does not prove what any institution “should” pay. It documents what Axios reported was paid.

The May 26 letters

On May 26, 2026, Mayor Connie Boesen sent letters seeking PILOT agreements from Governor Kim Reynolds and several large tax-exempt institutions, including UnityPoint Health, Broadlawns Medical Center, MercyOne, the Iowa Finance Authority, and the University of Iowa’s Pappajohn Education Center.1

The request came as the City projected a $12 million general-fund deficit in FY2028 and an additional $5 million deficit in the following fiscal year. The City attributes part of that pressure to Iowa’s new 2% annual cap on property-tax revenue growth and the loss of approximately $3.5 million in state backfill dollars from FY2027 to FY2028.2

The City’s own budget page also says approximately 40% of properties in Des Moines are tax-exempt. That sentence refers to the number of properties as the City describes it, not 40% of assessed value.2

The record has a gap

The public reporting establishes that hospitals once pledged $860,000 annually and made no PILOT contribution in the most recent five fiscal years. It does not establish from a primary year-by-year ledger exactly when payments stopped, whether they tapered, or why. We have not found a City payment history that answers those questions.

That is an important distinction. “No payments in five years” is supported by the reporting. “Hospitals broke a binding contract” is not supported by the records in hand, and this site does not say it.

What happens next

The 2026 property-tax legislation created a Polk County PILOT task force, with recommendations due to the Legislature in January 2027, according to the same reporting.1 Any new agreement, payment, response, or task-force document will be added to this site with its source.

Until then, the receipt is straightforward: a 1998 voluntary program, a reported $860,000 annual hospital pledge, no reported hospital contribution for five fiscal years, continued payments by other exempt authorities, and a new request from the Mayor in 2026.

References

1. Axios Des Moines — “Des Moines mayor seeks voluntary tax payments from nonprofits”
2. City of Des Moines — Research and Budget
3. Polk County Assessor — Commercial Inventory for Polk County

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Editorial disclosure

This article was researched and drafted with AI assistance, then checked against the cited public records. The data transformations and arithmetic are documented on our Methodology [blocked] page. AI does not decide whether a property qualifies for an exemption; that authority belongs to the Polk County Assessor and Iowa tax authorities.