By GENE KEMMETER
of The Gazette
Local governments in Portage County and the rest of Wisconsin may see some drastic cuts in service beginning as soon as March.
Gov. Scott McCallum proposed a plan Tuesday, Jan. 22, to balance the state's budget by cutting aid to local governments, using money from the tobacco settlement fund and trimming budgets for state agencies. The state reportedly faces a $1.1 billion deficit.
Local school districts would be exempted from the cuts, but the University of Wisconsin System would have to trim about $50 million.
To say local officials are upset would be an understatement, particularly since their spending has been limited by state-imposed levy limits for several years. Plus, that aid to local government, revenue sharing funds, has remained largely the same for the last several years. Those funds had been increased in the early 1970s to provide money to municipalities to replace property taxes when the state exempted manufacturing and equipment from the property taxes.
For Stevens Point, state aid amounts to about $4 million, nearly 23 percent of the city revenues. Portage County receives about $2.8 million in state aid, and the village of Plover gets $941,659.
Under the phased-in cuts, Stevens Point Mayor Gary Wescott said the city would have to cut $957,489 from the 2002 budget, an additional $1 million in 2003 and the remaining $2 million in 2004.
Wescott said the problem he has with the proposal is that state aid is not the big expenditure in the state budget. "The big spenders are state legislators," he said, pointing out that the state budget has increased from $3,192,700,000 in 1981 to $9,898,610,000 in 2001, a 211 percent increase.
At the same time, the city budget increased from $10,340,431 in 1981 to $19,043,722 in 2001, an 84 percent increase, he said. That means the city's budget increase was less than the rate of inflation, which was 96.1 percent during those 20 years, he said. During the last six years, the city's tax rate has also remained at $10.83 per $1,000 of assessed valuation.
"What I am very concerned about is the governor probably will so drastically change the delivery of local services that people won't realize the magnitude of what he proposed," Wescott said. "This is a state crisis and you cannot solve a state crisis by creating a local crisis."
Stevens Point has the seventh best bond rating by Moody's of 443 municipalities in the state, and the six above it all are larger cities, Wescott said, and the state's bond rating has been downgraded to junk-bond status.
County Board Chairman Clarence "Clem" Hintz said the loss of revenue sharing will mean it's almost impossible to continue providing some services. As an example, he said the county would have to cut $1 million from the Sheriff's Department.
"I'm really not happy," he said, "This is probably one of the most serious things that has happened to us in Wisconsin. I've never seen any governor come in with recommendations like McCallum did.
Hintz said he doesn't feel state legislators will go along with McCallum's plan and the County Board will send a letter to each legislator in the state, opposing the plan.
"It's just so unfair to taxpayers in the state of Wisconsin," he said, adding that the state should be looking at its own expenditures. "We are the service providers, they're not."