Issues of Local Control - Review of Act 12, June 20, 2023 - Community Conversations
Happy New Year! Our first Community Conversations of 2025 will address two issues we are grappling with here in Wisconsin, local control and Act 12, a law the Legislature adopted in 2023. We will meet from 12:30 to 2:30 pm on Saturday, Jan. 18 at Menomonie Public Library.
In our last Community Conversations in Nov. 2024, our participants were interested in discussing the issue of “Local Control.” Our local governments, cities, villages, townships, and counties, are where the citizens of our country have a voice in government. We interface daily with local government related to the services that bring us water, sewage & garbage disposal, street maintenance, police & fire protection, and emergency medical assistance. Other services that are important to us are our library services, the leisure center, community celebrations, parks and recreation.
Our state legislature often controls what ordinances can be passed by our local governments. State government also affects funding. It affects local budgets through levy limits and progressively decreasing “shared revenues” from our state income and sales taxes.
Act 12 of 2023, the new “shared revenue” bill, required a compromise between the Wisconsin legislature and the governor. As this law was not part of the state budget, there was no line item veto for the governor. Items in the legislation would have been vetoed by him if the items had been “stand alone” rather than packed into the shared revenue bill. The governor wanted to give local governments funds from the 7 billion dollar budget surplus as municipalities have had to deal with severe restrictions of funding along with the effects of recent inflation.
Join us, at our next Community Conversations at the Library, as we discuss Act 12, item by item. I will be using the Act Memo from the Wisconsin Legislative Council: https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/2023/related/lcactmemo/act012.pdf (Paste this address into the address bar of your web browser to view the act memo.) We will discuss the loss of advisory referendums, new restrictions on local health departments, and the specific prohibition of both discrimination or preferential treatment for persons in protected classes. We will discuss tax incentive districts (TIDs) that have been used to help increase the tax levies by new construction and how these TIDs have been effected by Act 12.
Our local state senator and assemblyman have been invited to this presentation. As we will discuss the impact of shared revenue and the regulation of TIDs on Menomonie, the mayor of Menomonie has also been invited.
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