Council Rejects Mayor’s Vetoes, Finalizes 2025 Budget

Milwaukee City Hall. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

The Milwaukee Common Council wasted no time Tuesday morning in overriding Mayor Cavalier Johnson‘s budget vetoes.

In less than five minutes, the council restored $4 million in additional borrowing to perform residential side street repair and unanimously overrode Johnson’s attempt to partially undo the council’s complicated omnibus amendment.

The moves marginally increase the property tax mill rate and could trigger contingent borrowing next year, but council members said they are working to provide services constituents desire.

“With this resolution, we’re not just addressing today’s needs; we’re also restoring critical funding levels for 2025 to ensure that our progress doesn’t stop here,” said Ald. Peter Burgelis, the author of the $4 million amendment, in a statement after the vote. “We must embrace a sustainable, fundable and realistic long-term plan to fix our city’s roads once and for all. Milwaukee deserves better than patchwork solutions, and this Council is committed to delivering lasting improvements.”

The only opposition to overriding the paving veto came from council members Scott Spiker and Milele A. Coggs.

“Absolutely in support of the issue… but as I stated earlier I have an issue with the funding,” said Spiker, the lone council member to speak about either veto during the meeting. “We’ll give the mayor a win to say that we’ve raised taxes further than he did… I think the fiscally responsible thing to do here would not be to add borrowing.”

The 2025 budget, as proposed by Johnson, already boosts annual new borrowing from $96 million to $116 million. The Burgelis amendment adds $4 million to the city’s High-Impact Paving Program, which quickly replaces the top layer of asphalt. Burgelis is seeking to reduce the city’s inventory of 466 miles of local roads in “poor” condition. In addition to other street projects, Johnson’s budget proposal included $6 million for high-impact paving.

The median city homeowner would pay an extra 50 cents in 2025 to fund the debt associated with repaving a couple dozen miles of roads.

Complicated Omnibus Vetoes

Without a word of discussion, the council unanimously struck down Johnson’s more complicated veto.

In modifying the mayor’s budget in recent years, council members have worked together on an “omnibus amendment” that bundles changes into a single amendment with broad council support. Johnson attempted to strike part of the 2025 amendment that allocated an additional $229,000 for high-impact paving and $370,000 for the council-controlled City Clerk‘s Office.

The vetoed funding came from removing $600,000 from a $2.5 million account used to pay legal settlements. The city routinely exceeds that amount, drawing from contingency funds or engaging in unplanned borrowing. In October, budget director Nik Kovac warned that the amendment, which also takes $2.66 million from two personnel accounts, would create a situation where contingent borrowing was likely.

“I believe all city departments should share the budgetary limitations on staffing and expenditures. And, I believe knowingly underfunding any budget category, with the intention of using contingent borrowing to fill an inevitable shortfall, is a mistake,” wrote Johnson in his veto message.

The Clerk’s Office would use the increased funding for an additional legislative fiscal analyst position, maintaining funding for Hip Hop Week MKE, buying a high-definition camera for the Milwaukee City Channel, procuring a municipal ID printer, buying office supplies, restoring a proposed 50% cut to conference attendance, expanding the use of Salesforce software to all council members, reversing a cut to the Milwaukee Excellence Fund and providing the Community Collaborative Commission with more funding.

Before voting on the budget, the council needed to approve a transfer from a contingency fund to the settlements account to pay legal claims. Kovac warned that because of election commission costs, the 2024 contingency fund was effectively exhausted and borrowing might be necessary to close the city’s 2024 books.

“It is remarkable that on the very day the Council voted to transfer $3.437 million from the contingent fund to the Damages and Claims fund in order to pay for settlements and judgments now expected to exceed $5 million in total for 2024, it subsequently reduced the Damages and Claims account for 2025 to $1.9 million, a funding level that is below the actual experienced expenditures in every year for the past decade,” wrote Johnson.

The mayor characterized the council’s omnibus amendment as a “backdoor method to increase our borrowing,” but said he supported some of the expenditures and thus didn’t veto the entire amendment.

Johnson, as Kovac did during the budget debate, said the council should take the funding from its own $2.4 million Citizen-Led Transformation Fund. But the council clearly disagreed. Following Tuesday’s votes, the 2025 budget is finalized.

The average homeowner will see the annual fee for services like water, sewers and street lights of $519.16 rise by $18.79, an increase caused by individual service fee increases ranging between 2% and 6%. The median homeowner, with a $166,500 property assessment, will see the city portion of their property tax bill rise by approximately $62, though the total tax bill will also include a Milwaukee Public Schools referendum and a Milwaukee County property tax increase. The city portion of the mill rate will fall from $9.47 to $8.30, driven by rising assessments. The amount the city will collect in property tax revenue, heavily restricted by state law, will climb by 2% to $324.15 million. The separate assessment process calculates the actual bill for any individual property and does not change how much, in total, the city can collect.