Executives of Portage County, the city of Stevens Point, the town of Hull and the villages of Plover and Whiting have voiced their objections to Gov. Scott McCallum for his Budget Reform Act and offered proposals as amendments to the act.
In a letter Monday, Feb. 4, to McCallum, the executives said the Budget Reform Act "casts an overtly burdensome mandate on the local government of Portage County" and strains the ties the McCallum administration has attempted to nurture between leaders at all levels of government in the state.
Signing the letter were Portage County Board Chairman Clarence Hintz; Stevens Point Mayor Gary Wescott; Plover Village President Ken Shibilski; Whiting Village President Charles Kell; Hull Town Chairman John Holdridge; Oliver Merriam, Plover administrator; John Schlice, Stevens Point comptroller/treasurer; Roger Wrycza, Portage County clerk; and Daryl J. DeDeker, Portage County finance director.
The letter says the proposed budget subverts the responsibility the state has placed on local governments and puts the existence of local governments in a precarious balance.
Portage County's local governments have "consistently strived for efficiency in government, by implementing intergovernmental partnerships at every opportunity," the letter says.
As examples of the cooperation, the letter points to the Portage County Business Park, the joint ambulance service, the county library system, the Department on Aging, a joint municipal telecommunications team and a cooperative recycling and landfill operation.
The proposals the executives offer as amendments includes "empower local government with the ability to better service its people by removing restrictions and allowing local government to more efficiently raise and allocate revenue; remove $15 billion worth of special exemptions to private real property taxes."
As a minimum, the proposal calls for a one-year moratorium on any reduction in shared revenue for local governments because any reduction now "would devastate and infringe upon any and all reliance factors concerning our budgets."
The proposal requests "a systematic and uniform tax-levy formula that all local governments can efficiently promulgate."
The executives call for sharing in the budget reduction by local governments, state government and non-instruction school operations and spreading out the cost of reducing the budget deficit instead of relying on 77.6 percent of the cuts from local government and "only 22.4 percent from state budgets."
While McCallum called local governments "Big Spenders" while announcing his Budget Reform Act, the executives in the county say the state is the real "Big Spender." The state operating budget has grown annually by 6.9 percent, more than twice the rate of inflation in recent years, according to the state's Legislative Fiscal Bureau.
The proposal said the state also needs to "respond to the state's deficit and the pressures on local governments by reducing or eliminating unfunded state mandates."
The letter also asks for a "prompt and constructive reply" from McCallum.