The Anti-Urban Views of Josh Schoemann

Josh Schoemann. Photo from Washington County.

Washington County has a big problem. Its population that is 60 and older is 20% higher than the national average. “Washington County has always had a challenge with bringing our kids back and getting them to return to Washington County to raise their families,” Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann noted in July.

His way of recruiting more residents, it appears, is by dumping on Milwaukee. No sooner than the City of Milwaukee’s new sales tax started, on January 1, then Schoemann offered a post on X, formerly Twitter noting that a $2,449.98 bedroom set would cost $60 more in Milwaukee due to the new sales tax, than in Washington County.

Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson called the comment “unfortunate,” telling reporter Cathy Kozlowicz that “all communities need revenue,” and “If folks are looking at a high-quality dinner or a theater or a fine dining experience, they can come here, or go to Cracker Barrel there.”

Schoemann’s response quickly took the disagreement to an ugly place, with a tweet declaring that “The working people who eat at Cracker Barrel are the same ones who will be paying your sales tax at Brewers, Bucks & Summerfest to bail out your poorly run govt, but by all means imply we’re deplorable. The real tragedy is the hardship you’ve put on the working people in MKE.”

This might seem a tempest in a teapot, one more red vs. blue spat, but Schoemann’s comment is so factually wrong, and yet so representative of a prevailing Republican view, that it deserves fuller examination.

Schoemann is not some crackpot, but a mainstream Republican and potential rising star, someone who ticks all the boxes. His campaign website describes him as “Courageous Conservative” and “seventh generation Washington County resident” who fought in the Iraq War and has a wife and two children who are “active members of Peace Lutheran Church in Hartford” and who “live on a farm in the Town of Trenton where they grow lavender and raise chickens.”

On X he cites a biblical passage, Romans 5:3-4, to declare his goal is “To serve my Lord, family & neighbors w/ the gifts He’s given me to achieve their goals, dreams & missions according to His purpose.”

And of course he is all about cutting taxes.” Don’t let politicians tell you we can’t cut taxes and fund essential services,” he declares. But he never acknowledge how much his county depends on Milwaukee to keep taxes down.

As a 2021 study done for Washington County found, it has 15,573 more outbound commuters to jobs than inbound, with most of the imbalance due to residents of its bedroom communities commuting to jobs in Milwaukee County. There, they work in buildings and perhaps go to restaurants and cafes that depend on local property taxes to pay for police, fire, garbage pickup, streets and lights and snowplowing.

Many Washington County residents also go to Bucks and Brewers games, the county zoo, Milwaukee Public Museum and so many other attractions that benefit from local taxes. The majority of Public Museum visitors come from beyond Milwaukee County, particularly Waukesha, Ozaukee, Washington and Racine counties. The situation is similar for the zoo, Milwaukee Symphony, Milwaukee Art Museum and other groups. Indeed, those attractions are a key selling point for area companies when the recruit executives. With that in mind the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce pushed to create some kind of regional culture and entertainment tax back in 2013, but the idea went nowhere, because officials in the WOW (Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington) counties opposed the idea.

Yet Milwaukee was barred from charging a local sales or income tax to help pay for all these regional attractions and incoming commuters, making it one of the only big cities in the nation without such a tax. The recent state legislation allowing Milwaukee to levy a sale tax and the county to increase its sales tax, came only after long lobbying by Johnson and County Executive David Crowley as part of a package that gave massive increases in state shared revenue to other municipal governments in the state.

How massive? Washington County got a 323% increase in state shared revenue, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau, compared to 16% for Milwaukee County. And Trenton, the town of 4,400 people where Schoemann lives, got a 301% increase in state shared revenue, compared to a 10% increase for the City of Milwaukee.

If the city and county got the same hikes in shared revenue, they probably wouldn’t have needed the new sales taxes.

As Johnson noted, people in places like Washington County got more state money “because of the negotiations” with legislators Johnson helped pursue. “You are welcome, Josh,” he chided.

And all this doesn’t even take into account that most of the metro area’s poor people reside in the city of Milwaukee, which puts an added burden on the city to spend money taking on challenges related to this. Surrounding counties have zoning restrictions on housing and lot sizes which effectively keep out poor people.

Schoemann’s idea of “affordable housing” is a plan that seeks to build 1,000 homes over the next decade — “the most expensive of which will be priced just under $420,000, with 75% of them listed under $320,000.” The price range was “determined based on the median household income of the county computed with the banking standard of devoting 30% of income toward housing.” In short, the goal is to bring in more people with the same income as current residents, in hopes this will attract more younger people.

And even as he does nothing to make the county more welcoming to low-income people, he wants to grab funding that is prioritizing poorer urban neighborhoods that have the worst problem with lead laterals and the potential for lead poisoning of children.

In September Schoemann complained that his office had twice reached out to the state to seek grant funding to help pay for lead laterals, but was “laughed at” and told they would not fit into the criteria for it. “We vote too red, we are too white and we are too green, meaning we vote too red, our skin is too white and we have too much green in our pockets,” he complained. “We will not qualify for a nickel of that.”

The problem of lead laterals is a massive one for Wisconsin, with an estimated 150,000 lead service lines across 92 communities, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum, with not nearly enough money to pay for it. Milwaukee has the most pipes to be replaced, with upward of 70,000 lead lines. In Washington County the numbers are tiny; for instance there is an estimated 850 lead laterals in West Bend and the Town of Barton.

In response to Schoemann’s racially loaded complaint about the lead lateral funding the Germantown Community Coalition released a statement with a “condemnation of Mr. Schoemann’s harmful comments.”

“We call on Mr. Schoemann to do better,” they declared. “As County Executive of Washington County, we believe Mr. Schoemann should represent all people of Washington County without bias. He can begin to repair the damage caused by his comments by issuing an apology.”

But they don’t get it. These kind of comments are exactly how he plans to get reelected.