(Note to Alliance web site visitors: The following was Rich Eggleston's response to Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk's response to a column by Isthmus Editor Marc Eisen. More on this issue can be found by clicking here.)

Of course, she couldn't point to Milwaukee, which has one of the lowest per-capita property values in the state ($28,641 in 2000), compared with Brookfield ($113,444) or even the other communities in Milwaukee County ($58,771 in the aggregate).

She couldn't point to Racine (per-capita property value $29,564), compared with the town of Mount Pleasant ($66,687) or the town of Caledonia ($55,017).

They, not Portland or Seattle, are the poster children of what happens to cities when annexations are made impossible or almost impossible. The growth that was rightfully theirs was removed beyond their borders by shortsighted politics.

They, not Portland and Seattle, are examples of the social and economic polarization that can occur when cities are not allowed to grow. Southeastern Wisconsin, not Portland or Seattle, contains examples of the environmental mess that also can occur when cities are not allowed to grow.

It’s been a vicious cycle in Wisconsin and a lot of other states. First, beginning in the 1950s, there was white flight from major urban areas to newer, greener, sprawled-out communities. The parent cities continued to provide services to the residents of these new communities, allowing comparatively wealthy new suburbs to enjoy lower taxes subsidized by the older, poorer communities.

These tax disparities were somewhat alleviated in Wisconsin by state shared revenues — in effect, hush money to central cities to stop complaining about the flight of wealth beyond their borders. Had cities and villages been able to unilaterally annex land subject to development, they would have had more of the tax base they need to serve their citizens, and less need for shared revenues.

Another problem is that county governments provide metropolitan services in rural areas, billing city, village and town taxpayers alike for services that are largely provided solely to town residents. The services in question are tailored to the needs of low-density municipalities. But high-density communities help pay the bill. That’s just as unfair as billing low-density rural communities for services tailored to city taxpayers.

Tax-base and tax-rate disparities exacerbate the differences between communities with high concentrations of wealth and communities with high concentrations of poverty. Concentrations of poverty increase the need for services while concentrations of wealth reduce the need for services. When those areas are in close proximity, areas of wealth draw more and more new tax base compared with areas with high poverty, further increasing the disparities.

"The inequitable sharing of the financial burden among the governments in an urban area is a crucial consideration in any examination of the state’s urban problem," a blue-ribbon panel reported to Wisconsin’s governor and Legislature. "In many places the central city underwrites in whole or in part the costs of government for the entire urban complex. That is, the city provides certain overhead operations necessary to the whole area."

The blue-ribbon group from which I quote also concluded that there are too many local units of government in Wisconsin (currently 72 counties, 190 cities, 395 villages and 1,256 towns) and that "the number of independent and overlapping units within an urban area produces a governmental pattern which is inadequate to solve area-wide problems."

The above is not from the Governor’s Blue Ribbon Commission on State-Local Partnership for the 21st Century, chaired by UW Polical Scientist Don Kettl, although the Kettl Commission drew many of the same conclusions. It is straight out of the 1959 report of the Interim Urban Problems Committee, submitted to Governor Gaylord Nelson and the Legislature.

The issue of tax rate disparities between cities and urbanizing towns could have been remedied without state tax dollars had a reasonable annexation law been in place in Wisconsin four decades ago. It wasn’t.

Rich Eggleston
Wisconsin Alliance of Cities

(c) 2001 Isthmus Publishing Co.
Reprinted with Permission.