2012 County Budget Update & How Our Reliance on Property Taxes Is Unsustainable
I've been a bit behind in posting updates about the 2012 County Budget battle that's been taking place over the past few months. Without rehashing the entire thing, it looks like the pattern of County Exec. proposing no tax increase and the County Board coming back with modest increases has happened again.
The Milwaukee County Board on Wednesday completed work on the 2012 budget by overriding most of County Executive Chris Abele's vetoes, resulting in a property tax levy increase of $5.8 million, or 2.15%.
The board reversed Abele vetoes to restore $1.6 million and avoid layoffs of 27 sheriff's deputies; $3 million to soften a big increase in county employee health insurance costs; and nearly $800,000 for paramedic subsidies.
Abele had sought a tax levy freeze for 2012 at this year's $269.6 million. The board's action raises that to $275.4 million to be collected from property taxes toward a $1.2 billion budget.
The impact of the levy increase on the owner of a $150,000 home in Milwaukee will be a $3.84 increase in taxes, according to a County Board estimate. The rise is expected to be significantly higher in many Milwaukee County suburbs. – jsonline.com
Once again, Milwaukee County Parks will see a decrease in their budget while being expected to raise more revenue for themselves. It's sad and as I've pointed out before, the blame for this can be spread far and wide and isn't unique to this County Executive or the previous one.
I was also disappointed to see that Sheriff's Deputies were facing such a huge cut and many of them were to be laid off. This rests on the shoulders of the Sheriff himself as he'd rather deal with a cut to his budget by laying off Deputies instead of cutting high profile – and low impact – programs like his lakefront "command center" or "boot camp".
Thankfully, the grown ups with the Sheriff's Deputies Assoc. and County Board were able to restore some funding and prevented a major layoff which would have taken Deputies out of our neighborhoods and parks and put them in the unemployment line.
Everything can be traced back to the fact that our funding mechanism is completely and utterly broken. As long as we remain over reliant on a property tax to fund the services we all rely on, this cycle of tax increases coupled with service decreases will continue.
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Ok, so what is your solution. And please don’t say we have to change state funding. So, what will/can you do under the current system, or what wil you change on the Conty level?
The best, most effective revenue generator is developing public space on or around the lakefront. Not just a little coffee shop, or an expensive restaurant up on a hill – REAL development.
Well, dan, it’s been 3 days since I posted, so why are you ducking the issue? How will you solve the problems of the budgets?
And what neighborhoods does the sheriff’s patrol? Are you saying that those nighborhoods that the sheriff is patrolling, their local police departments are not serving their neighborhoods and communities?
I realize you are busy, but you are the one who put it out there and you should really answer. Thank you for your response.
@Dan H. Deputies are in pretty much every neighborhood near a County Park or those neighborhoods along County roads (lakefront, 794) and parkways. Solving our continuing budget problem isn’t so simple that it can be fit into the comment section of a weblog, but I’ve written about several of the possibilities in the past including a dedicated sales tax to replace portions of the property tax levy, looking at the creation of a parks district and consolidating services between County and municipalities.
All of those are significant ideas which could have a major impact on the budget instead of the small tax increase/small service decrease scenario that I described above and without any big changes will continue for the foreseeable future.