By BRIAN LEAHY
of The Gazette
County officials plan a full-court press to keep Gov. Scott McCallum's plan to quickly end state shared revenues from happening.
Under McCallum's plan announced Jan. 22, Portage County would only receive $105,492 in state shared revenues this year - only 4 percent of the $2,781,230 the county had budgeted for 2002. The city of Stevens Point, villages and towns also take substantial hits. County department heads met last week to start determining how the loss of shared revenues would impact their departments. Late this week they were to meet again to say what the impacts to their departments could be.
The department heads will put those impacts into dramatic terms, like "we won't be able to investigate child abuse cases." The impact of the possible cuts will then be relayed to legislators when County Board Chairman Clarence Hintz and other county officials are in Madison from Monday, Feb. 4, to Wednesday, Feb. 6, to drum up opposition to McCallum's plan. County officials are also tallying up the costs of unfunded state mandates.
Possible impacts already identified include waiting two or three days after a snowfall to clear some county highways, not hiring temporary staff for county parks and having fewer deputies patrolling roads. Instead of cutting every department's budget an equal percentage, county officials may prioritize and cut some departments less than others.
Getting legislators to oppose the plan is crucial, Hintz said at the county Finance Committee meeting Monday, Jan. 28. Support of at least two-thirds of legislators would be needed to override any gubernatorial veto.
"Right now the governor has said he won't back off from this," Hintz said.
The proposed shared revenue reduction would take place by July, when the state starts its new fiscal year, county Finance Director Bo DeDeker said. Because the county's fiscal year started Jan. 1, the county would see about a $1.5 million loss in revenues for the current budget.
In his budget address, McCallum said the state needed to solve the $1.1 billion budget shortfall, brought on by the national recession and a downturn in Wisconsin's economy, without raising taxes. A major reason Wisconsin's taxes are higher than in other states is it ranks sixth among states in the amount of aid provided to local governments, he said. Revenue sharing accounts for 60 percent of state spending.
The Wisconsin Counties Association (WCA) counters that only 15 percent of the state budget is aid to cities, counties, towns and villages. The other 45 percent is aid to schools, which is left "unscathed" in the governor's budget proposal.
"We are not the 'Big Spenders.' We do not have loads of fat laying around and a $3 million cut will hurt us very severely," said DeDeker.
Shared revenue payments to counties have remained the same in actual dollars since 1995, according to the WCA. In the same period, the state budget has gone from $15.5 billion to $23.3 billion.
McCallum said in his address the shared revenue cuts are a 4 percent reduction to local governments this year, while the state government budget operations are being trimmed 11.5 percent. The WCA argues the state agency reduction only applies to the operating portions of their budgets, unlike the cuts to local governments, which apply across to their entire budgets.
"If one utilizes the same criteria in determining the state agencies reductions as the governor did in determining local government's reduction it is less than one-half of a percent cut," the WCA said.
County officials also counter that much of their spending is the result of unfunded state mandates.
"Our main concerns are the mandated programs they have put upon us," Hintz said.
Examples of county support for state-mandated programs include the county paying for the secretarial staff in the District Attorney's office (district attorneys are state employees), the Clerk of Courts office, which serves the state court system, and keeping state Probation and Parole clients, who violated terms of their supervision, in the county jail.
No one knows for sure if McCallum's budget proposal will be enacted, but the Finance Committee adopted some cost containment strategies just in case it is.
The Finance Committee enacted a hiring replacement freeze for all county workers, except for the jail and Health Care Center. The committee also voted to put all capital project expenditures not already in progress on hold.
The Lincoln Center expansion will continue, but the Finance Committee will explore other methods to fund its share of the county-city project. The county had originally planned to use money from its reserve funds for the project, but is considering borrowing funds. Bond interest rates are now about 2 percent, compared to the better than 4 percent interest the county receives on its reserve funds, DeDeker said. The reserve funds might also now be needed for other expenses.
Finance Committee members don't want to bring the county to a complete stop.
"We better get people to work instead of paying unemployment through the nose," Supervisor Dwight Stevens said.
Any cuts to county programs will most likely be painful to someone.
"We don't have a program in Portage County that doesn't benefit anybody," Supervisor James Gifford said. "Every program has a constituency."
Another issue the county should be concerned about is the "cascading effects" of cuts to local governments, Gifford said. With reduced revenues, towns may decide to send their solid waste to someplace other than the county sanitary landfill, which is already dealing with reduced revenues because of decreased tonnage. Towns could also cut road projects contracted with the county Highway Department.
Local officials are waiting for legislators to come up with their own plans to repair the broken state budget.
"So far all everybody in the state of Wisconsin has done is (complain)," Supervisor Lonnie Krogwold said. "No one has come out with an alternative."
Some political analysts believe McCallum's budget plan is an effort to streamline local governments by getting rid of towns. In his budget address McCallum said his plan is "a bold plan that completely restructures the state and local financial partnership … a plan that forces a major examination of how local governments are funded, organized and provide services." Within a 10-mile radius of downtown Appleton, there are more than 50 units of local government - three counties, four cities, five villages, eight school districts, 16 towns and 19 sanitary districts, he said.
Wisconsin has more local units of government, 3,059, than all but 10 states, and is only one of 18 states with both county and town governments, according to a Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance report issued in December. A paradox is Wisconsin has an abundance of local government, but only gives local units a little bit of fiscal autonomy compared to other states.
Sensing a major change in how local governments are organized, Portage County has put on hold its strategic planning process looking at improving county government services. The county doesn't want to adopt changes now only to find out in six months that government has changed "dramatically and drastically," DeDeker said.