Time for County Board to Guts Up

Milwaukee County Courthouse. Photo by Graham Kilmer.

It was a clear act of courage by Milwaukee Common Council members.

Two weeks ago they voted to approve a 2% city sales tax. Yes, it was needed to stave off financial disaster, but that’s a big increase in taxes by politicians who will face the voters by next February and again in April, in the spring primary and general elections. Many council members grumbled at the ugly choice they faced.

Yet they did the right thing, in what Alderwoman JoCasta Zamarripa called “the most important vote of our careers.” The state law required a super-majority of 10 of 15 council members to approve it and 12 voted yes, a sign of how important they viewed this issue.

What a contrast to the county board, which has run for cover on this issue, even though it need only pass a .0.4% increase in the county sales tax, or 4 cents on a $10 purchase. Few supervisors have been willing to express support for this issue, and there have been all kinds of public hearings scheduled by them to gauge public opinion.

And yet supervisors have far more political protection on this issue. For starters, it’s a well-known rule of politics that voters always call their alders first when they have complaints and rarely call county board members or state legislators. That tendency will be magnified in this case, with the city passing a tax that’s five times higher than the proposed county tax. For every county supervisor representing a city area, they can simply blame the alderperson for the 2% hike.

Supervisors also have less to lose: they get a part-time salary while alders are paid full time. Yet it’s the city politicians showing far more courage.

First-term county supervisor Juan Miguel Martinez pushed to delay the vote. “The simple fact of the matter is that I was hoping for more time to decide to vote on this,” he said.

But the idea of getting state legislative permission to increase the sales tax has been discussed for years, since before Martinez was elected, and has been repeatedly pushed by Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley since Martinez joined the board in April 2022. If Martinez is not prepared for this issue, he hasn’t been paying attention.

The leading voice of opposition has been Sup. Ryan Clancy, who offered several misleading arguments. First, that the sales tax is regressive. True, but the property tax, the main tax the county uses for funding, is nearly as regressive.  And when you take into consideration that a portion of the sales tax is paid by visitors to Milwaukee, there’s not much difference in how the two taxes fall on lower income voters.

Clancy also argued that the board should wait until Wisconsin gets a new Legislature through fair maps that end gerrymandering. But as Milwaukee County Corporation Counsel Margaret Daun noted, that could take as long as five years. Moreover, there is no guarantee the U.S. Supreme Court wouldn’t overthrow a state Supreme Court ruling ending gerrymandering. Nor is there any guarantee that a more Democratic Legislature would vote to give just one county of 72 a special bailout package.

But Clancy’s most outrageous claim was that the county doesn’t face financial peril. “The breathless list of concerns that we’ve heard are years away,” he said.

In fact, the Crowley administration and the county comptroller have provided profuse documentation of the impact for the county should it not get the projected $82 million per year in new sales tax revenue. The bleeding would begin immediately and get ever more drastic in the five years or more it might take to realize Clancy’s unlikely vision of a state bailout.

County Parks, already in decline due to inadequate financing, would see its funding cut in half. The transit system would have to severely cut back its bus routes. All county funding for cultural institutions like the War Memorial, Milwaukee Art Museum and Milwaukee Public Museum, would be eliminated. All senior centers would be eliminated by 2028. Every county department would face a minimum funding cut of 20%, including Behavioral Health Services, Child Support Services and the Department of Health and Human Services.

As one citizen, Terry King pleaded with the board, people like her who lack a car depend on the the bus for access to jobs, grocery stores and health care, “If we don’t have county transit, we won’t have any way to get anything that we need,” she said. “We have to fund transit. It means jobs, it means schools, it means everything.”

And when these cuts come, the outrage from citizens will be county-wide. There will likely be opponents of every supervisor who voted against the tax hike, who will point out that city officials did the right thing to protect their services and supervisors were scared to do this. It will be a very easy issue for voters to understand. This could make it difficult to get reelected.

This Thursday supervisors will face a vote on the sales tax. They, too, need a super-majority, with at least 12 of 18 board members voting yes. They might want to consider not just what voters will say if they vote for the tax hike, but what the voters will say if they don’t.

As Crowley put it in a statement to Urban Milwaukee, the choice is clear: “Milwaukee County’s financial situation is dire. In just two years, we will face a transit cliff that will threaten a quarter of current transit services. In just four years, we will face a deficit so large we will have to cut department budgets by 40% across the board. A sales tax is not anyone’s favored method of solving the problem – but it is the cheapest option for our residents, and more importantly: it’s the only option available to us.”

The alternative, he noted, was to “allow the county to fall off a fiscal cliff and cause irreparable harm to the quality of life for our residents.”

And when that happens — and it will — people will know exactly who are the supervisors that allowed this to happen.