By Portage County Executive Chris Holman

It’s early 2019, and the holiday season has passed. As with most things, though, life goes on and that is certainly true at the county.

I thought it might be good to write a summary on a few things that you can expect to see being talked about and worked on around Portage County as we get back into our grooves, try to follow our New Year’s resolutions, and hope for a little more snow (and not all of it in April). So, I’ll start this piece off by talking about county buildings, county roads, and county priorities.

Portage County has been talking about what to do with many of its buildings for the better part of the last 25 years. The city-county building is 60 years old, the Ruth Gilfry Center is 40 years old, the Annex is 20 years old, and the Law Enforcement Center and the Jail are both about 30 years old. The county’s courtrooms have been identified as outdated and unsafe for over a decade, and the jail didn’t really meet the county’s needs from day one, either.

There have been two public workshops held so far to look at potential building projects that would answer some of our long-term needs in the county. As with roads and other infrastructure, buildings deteriorate over time and eventually need to be repaired or replaced.

To give you an idea of where we are at with one piece of the puzzle, we had an outside firm conduct an assessment of the current Law Enforcement Center and County Jail. We wanted to know how much time it would take and how much it would cost to renovate it for the short-term and bring it up to code. The answer? $26.5 million and several years of moving around a construction site, shipping more inmates than usual, and being more inefficient than we are now given our space restrictions. If building new would cost twice that amount but set you up for stability and greater efficiency over the next 40-50 years, does it make sense to invest in long-term answers to our infrastructure questions?

Portage County is not the only county finding itself with this question, either. Just last year, Adams County was faced with the state telling them to update their jail or maybe having to shut it down. An initial proposal to add a couple of additions to their current facility had a cost of approximately $15 million. Also last year, Dane County had to change their plans for building a $75.2 million jail on top of their Public Safety building because of structural concerns. Elsewhere in the state, Oconto County transitioned into a new jail in 2017 at a cost of around $30 million.

These are large dollar figures, no doubt, and with referendums passing around the state, people are feeling like taxes are going up. However, according to the Wisconsin Policy Bureau’s report in December of 2018, “Wisconsin’s tax burden—defined as state and local taxes as a share of income—fell in 2018 to its lowest level in nearly 50 years. Taxes accounted for 10.5% of income, down slightly from 10.6% in 2017, marking the seventh consecutive annual decrease.”

How can the tax burden be at a record low while people are seeing their local tax bills go up?

Part of the answer is that the funding that would normally come from the state through other channels has been frozen, reduced, and/or eliminated. So, we at the local level have been put into the position of asking ourselves if we are going to better fund things like schools and roads or let them continue to lag behind and let their infrastructure further deteriorate. In the last election, the residents of Portage County passed referendums by a large margin that led to property tax increases that, in effect, replace the lack of some funding through those other channels.

Many folks have expressed frustration with the referendums, but local governments and school districts wouldn’t go to referendum if sustainable funding was part of the state’s long-term plan. Unfortunately, shifting costs to the local level like this is increasingly common. The next area we might feel a funding pinch is with bridge and culvert aids from the state. Bridges built for the loads we know they’ll carry—versus what the state may be willing to fund—aren’t cheap. Local leaders and taxpayers may be asked, again, to make up for a lack of agreement and/or sustainable funding and planning at the state level.

To be fair, government at every level can benefit from better approaches to long-term planning. It would be dishonest to ignore how we’ve played a hand in getting ourselves to where we are today. Though, when past opinions of the Attorney General state that, “Counties are creatures of the Legislature and their powers must be exercised within the scope of authority ceded to them by the state,” you get an idea of where you stand (77 Op. Att’y Gen. 87, 87 (1988)).

Next Week: The Wheel Tax