Stuck in the middle with you

How both shared revenue plans leave Wausau in the middle

There’s a battle going on at the statehouse right now over shared revenue. Either side seems to leave Wausau in the middle.

The GOP’s version aportions higher percentage increases to small, rural municipalities, and all shared revenue comes with restrictions around keeping certain levels of law enforcement. The Recombobulation Area has a great recap of the whole scenario (slanted a little to the left/Milwaukee, but mostly just a good factual recounting):

The Wisconsin State Assembly just passed a bill reshaping the state’s shared revenue system. What’s in it?

Evers version does largely the opposite — bigger cities see a much bigger increase under the governor’s vision of shared revenue.

Shared revenue is the percentage paid by the state every year to help with things like fixing the roads. Municipalities count on those aids and factor them into their annual budgets. They’re based on a formula(s) set by the state.

One of the Act 10 items that people often forget about is that the state under then-governor Scott Walker reduced shared revenue, at the same time that it set limits on how much municipalities can raise taxes. That put a squeeze on municipalities. Many made up the difference by imposing new or expanded fees for services over time. Sometimes municipalities cut services altogether.

Wausau, under both plans, is stuck right in them middle. Here is how the city will fare under either plans.

Wausau and shared revenue

It needs to be stated from the get-go that Wausau benefits from either plan — in fact, every municipality, no matter the size, sees its shared revenue increase from either the GOP plan or Evers’ plan.

This is a good chart from The Recombobulation Area, showing how municipalities fare under both plans:

Wausau falls into the second category from the right. Wausau would gain a higher percentage increase in aid as well as a much higher per capita amount of aid under Evers’ plan. So Wausonians might hope for Evers’ plan to be adopted.

But of course, under Evers’ plan, bigger cities (in case you’re wondering, only Madison and Milwaukee fall under that last category) would get a higher percentage increase. Under the GOP plan, Wausau gets a bigger increase in per capita shared revenue than under Evers, but less of a percentage increase under Evers’ proposal.

Small towns, however, benefit more from the GOP plan than they do from Evers’ — they’re the one category of municipality that would do better both in percentage increase and per capita increase.

Both plans seemed aligned to their voting bases. Rural voters have tended to vote for Republicans, and urban voters for Democrats. Wausau is, of course, stuck in the middle of all this.

We saw this back when the Evers’ budget included larger increases for Milwaukee and Dane county prosecutors, despite their district attorney offices being staffed more than or close to recommended levels; where Marathon County received fewer than the number of new prosecutors it asked for, despite being understaffed according to that same report. ¹

The GOP’s plan includes some oddities though: it changes the structure of the city’s Police and Fire Commission in Milwaukee; only Milwaukee. Civilian-controlled police and fire commissions have a lot of power: they hire and fire chiefs, launch investigations into misconduct when needed, among other policy setting.

In fact, there are a lot of restrictions specifically on Milwaukee (county and city) as The Recombobulation Area reports:

Unlike the version of the policy advocated by the Evers administration, however, the Assembly bill includes a dizzying array of new top-down restrictions on the state’s largest city and county. In addition to sharply limiting the purposes of new sales tax revenue to outstanding pension obligations and public safety, the legislation imposes new limits on governments’ ability to support nonprofit partnerships and the arts, prohibits any local tax expenditures on Milwaukee’s burgeoning streetcar system, strips authority from the city’s civilian-controlled Fire and Police Commission, and eliminates majority-rule on City and County spending decisions. Under the initial version of the Assembly bill, Milwaukee City and County could only enact new expenditures with a two-thirds vote of their respective legislative bodies. 

The bottom line is every municipality in the state will see increases in shared revenue regardless of which version passes. In terms of pure dollars and cents, municipalities with populations of more than 5,000 people will benefit more from Evers’ proposal; municipalities of less than 5,000 will do better under the GOP plan.

1. BTW, those numbers got significantly worse before the budget was passed. The DA’s Office struggles to this day with staffing (unless something magically changed since the last time I checked into it). Weirdly I tried to find that list of prosecutors per county and I keep coming up with the proposal, not the actual list. Marathon County got less than it had hoped for when the actual budget passed.