New Courthouse Expected to Hike Property Taxes

Conceptual rendering of new Milwaukee County criminal courthouse.

A new Milwaukee County criminal courthouse could nearly double Milwaukee County’s debt, leading to an increase in property taxes.

County Executive David Crowley‘s administration has not publicly released a recommended strategy for financing the massive project, estimated to cost $490 million. To date, the county has budgeted for approximately $54.5 million in cash financing and $436 million in debt, according to a May report by the Office of the Comptroller.

Under state law, the county can borrow to cover infrastructure costs, which it does by issuing debt in the form of municipal bonds. But if the county borrows the remaining $436 million for the project, the county’s overall outstanding debt will nearly double from $484.5 million to $890.4 million, according to the comptroller report. When factoring in the cost of interest on the debt over the life of the bonds, the cost rises from $436 million to $748 million.

The new courthouse would replace the dilapidated, nearly 100-year-old Safety Building at 821 W. State St. It is considered by court officials to be an impediment to the smooth, safe operations of a circuit court system. The historic courthouse at 901 N. 9th Street would remain and receive updates. The county development team is designing a flexible, modern courthouse focused on safety and ease of access for those working in and interacting with the criminal justice system. There are also facilities specifically designed for problem-solving courts that take a holistic approach to criminal justice considering an individual’s life circumstances alongside their criminal violations.

In 2025, the Crowley administration, alongside partners from the courts like Chief Judge Carl Ashley, lobbied for $250 million in funding from the state biennial budget. In the end, the county received only $40 million for expressway patrol funding, which the administration is only passing through the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office budget as a backdoor financing mechanism.

Without state support, the question remains: How will the county finance the courthouse project?

In recent months, county supervisors have heard some ideas from administration officials and the comptroller. They boil down to two general strategies. The first is a temporary moratorium on county infrastructure spending to direct all the county’s available resources toward construction of the courthouse, called a bonding moratorium. The second is simpler: raise property taxes.

Under state law, the county’s authority to raise property taxes is strictly constrained unless it is raising taxes to pay back debt. The county has a statutory debt limit of approximately $5.3 billion. The county is currently exercising only about 8% of the statutory limit, according to a June project report to the county board. Still, as acting deputy chief of staff Jeremy Lucas has noted, the state debt limit isn’t a realistic figure for the county’s potential capacity to borrow. “I would say no one would loan us $5.3 billion,” he told the board’s Committee on Community, Environment and Economic Development on June 15.

If the county bonds for the remaining project costs, the administration estimates property taxes will increase by approximately $88 per year for a home with an equalized value of $250,000, according to reports released to supervisors in June and to the county board.

But that’s based on current costs. “The project costs are still in refinement; they continue to grow,” Aaron Hertzberg, director of the Department of Administrative Services told supervisors during a June 15 Committee on Finance meeting.

The county also has a self-imposed bonding limit, which was approximately $56 million in 2026. This is the limit on borrowing for infrastructure projects across the county — for Milwaukee County Parks, county highways, the Milwaukee County Transit System, the Milwaukee County Zoo and more. In 2026, the county had more than $100 million worth of project requests that did not receive funding, according to a recent report to county supervisors from the Facilities Management Division.

The new courthouse represents the single largest infrastructure project needed in the county, according to the facilities report. But across the county, there is an estimated $1 billion in infrastructure needs over the next five years, including $500 million in Milwaukee County Parks. For this reason, supervisors on the Committee on Finance were taken aback when the idea of a two-year bonding moratorium came up in a report from the comptroller in May.

Sup. Shawn Rolland said it was a “pretty significant” suggestion that the county could stop borrowing for other infrastructure spending for two years. Said Sup. Justin Bielinski: “The idea of taking two years off of bonding altogether for one particular project that doubles our debt service in a year seems to be quite rash.”

The county did it in the past. In 2009, while taking advantage of a federal program that reimbursed interest costs in the wake of the global financial crisis, the county lumped three years (2009-2011) of capital projects into two budgets, then didn’t issue any debt in 2011 or 2012, said Pamela Bryant, director of finance for the comptroller.

Justin Rodriguez, capital projects manager for the comptroller, noted that policymakers could also simply reduce regular bonding, in lieu of an outright moratorium.

At that meeting, Hertzberg cautioned that this was just one piece of a larger analysis of the county’s financing options. When Facilities Management reported to supervisors on deferred maintenance in June, it also reported that a bonding moratorium for other infrastructure needs would significantly worsen the county’s backlog of maintenance, pushing infrastructure to more failures, more emergency fixes, impacts to county services and higher future costs.

The courthouse is also a major contributor to the county’s list of deferred maintenance.

“There’s a cost to inaction,” Hertzberg told the Committee on Finance in June. “If we continue to defer maintenance, it catches up with us at some point and has direct impacts on our operational budget.”

The Crowley administration is expected to release a new cost estimate and a recommendation for financing the project in July.

During the June Committee on Finance meeting, Sup. Anne O’Connor suggested the administration work with community stakeholders to explain the project’s rationale and financial implications.

“We are the ones here that are really gonna hear it when the taxes go up,” she warned.

Update: This story has been updated to clarify that the new courthouse would replace the Safety Building at 821 W. State St., not the historic courthouse at 901 N. 9th Street.

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