Letter to the editor: Marathon County is raising taxes while sitting on millions in reserves

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Marathon County has more than $64 MILLION in EXCESS Reserves and still wants to raise your property taxes.

Call or Email your County Supervisor and ask them to cut $1.6 million from the proposed 2025 property tax increase AND rescind the County wheel tax. The $64M+ in EXCESS reserves are just from the County’s General Fund, Social Improvement Fund, and Highway Fund and DOES NOT include the normal fund balance reserves needed for working capital.

The County’s Policy is to have a minimum Fund Balance of 8.3% of the current Budgeted Expenditures of the General Fund, Social Service Fund, and Debt Service Fund and 10% of the Budgeted Expenditures of the Highway Fund. I don’t believe that these percentages provide adequate working capital, so I used 25% in my calculations to provide a higher cash cushion. Using the higher 25% number, I calculate $30,256,598 in recommended reserves out of the total $103,237,090 available fund balance (per Audit, year end 2023) for just these 4 County Funds.

I subtracted off the $8,000,000 that the County recently agreed to loan Bug Tussel when calculating the EXCESS reserves. I did not add in any of the $10,384,837 surplus that the County has generated in 2024 through 8/31/24 as we don’t currently know the actual end of year 2024 results.

To get a sense of the magnitude of Marathon County’s EXCESS reserves, the County could totally eliminate the entire proposed $59,851,312 of 2025 County Property Tax (which I am NOT recommending) and would be expected to still have over $4 million in EXCESS reserves at the end of 2025.

The $64+ million in EXCESS Reserves doesn’t even take in account any excess funds that may be in the $16.6M Grant Fund, the $16.4M Capital Improvement Fund, the $6.6M Insurance Fund, or the $11.4M Employee Benefits Fund.

The combined proposed tax reduction and wheel tax removal would only use about 10% of the excess reserves in the four funds. At this rate it would take 10 years to draw down the EXCESS reserves, but it would at least be a small step in the right direction.

You can find your Supervisor’s contact information at

https://www.marathoncounty.gov/about-us/government/county-board/members

I am emailing this information to many of our County Board Supervisors, so please feel free to refer to it or simply email, text, or call your Supervisor to say “Cut $1.6 million from the proposed property tax increase and rescind the County Wheel tax.”

There are many Supervisors who would like to reduce your taxes, but they need to hear from you to offset the coercion and persuasion they will face from the few in leadership that want to continue to raise our taxes despite the high EXCESS reserves. There are the votes on the Board to make this happen on November 12th if people are willing to take a few minutes to call, text, or email their Supervisor.

David Baker

Kronenwetter, WI