Mayor Tom Barrett

"Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett warned...that attorneys and accountants will not hesitate to create tax-exempt facilities to shelter the wealth of the wealthy," Anita Weier of The Capital Times wrote in a story here.

"The schools and police and fire services will be paid for by a smaller number of individuals," Mayor Barrett said. "It is inequitable."

The people who move into such places have enough money to pay for medical services, he said, while a low-income person with an $80,000 home would be on Medicaid.

"This property tax exemption is now being used to shift the property tax burden," said Lodi Mayor Paul Fisk, stating that he tried but did not succeed in negotiating a payment in lieu of taxes by a residential housing complex in his community.

Mayor Mike Miller of West Bend said the elegant Cedar Ridge Apartments in his community pays no property taxes while a poor woman who lives across from City Hall struggles to pay hers.

"Cedar Ridge does nothing for the community," Mayor Miller said. "It is there for the people who live there."

"Here in Colorado, where I now make my home, I can state unequivocally and from personal experience that TABOR has decimated many of the most basic services that citizens demand and expect of their government," former Madison resident Todd Van Fossen of Denver wrote in a letter to the editor in The Capital Times.

"School funding in Colorado, for example, is now among the lowest in the nation, and there is serious debate about whether public funding will continue to be available for the state university system.  ...  The arts, as they exist here, are entirely reliant upon the generosity of philanthropists. And transportation improvements, such as the rapid transit program recently passed in metro Denver, are dependent on local referendums to approve additional sales tax levies.

"TABOR is promoted as a panacea -- a way to control taxation and reduce the size of government without 'penalty.' In fact, the opposite is true. Because politicians must run for re-election, and therefore cannot entirely gut basic services without backlash at the polls, TABOR becomes the ultimate in tax shifting and shell games. The result: blatantly regressive taxation and the erosion or elimination of the most basic services."

Letter is here.

TABOR: Bad for your car

"I moved to Colorado from Wauwatosa in July 2000 due to a job transfer," Tim Heimerl of Westminster, Colo., wrote in a letter to the Wisconsin State Journal.

"...I dearly wish I had read more about the so-called 'Taxpayer Bill of Rights' (TABOR) that had passed in Colorado in the early 1990s and is now being discussed in Wisconsin. ...The first thing we noticed after moving was the state of Colorado's school system. It lags Wisconsin's in too many ways to count.

"Then there are the roads in Colorado.   Like the idea of having your wheels aligned two times a year due to terribly rutted highways? ...Snow removal is a joke. Your old car will cost you hundreds of collars to register annually. You start to notice your car is under constant repair due to excessive wear and tear, all for modestly lower taxes..."

Letter here.

The history of Southeastern Wisconsin offers little encouragement to efforts to cooperate regionally and reduce the cost of government, the Milwaukee-based Public Policy Forum says in its latest Regional Report.

"The fact that our strongest examples of regional agreements (SEWRPC and MMSD) are also the most controversial says much about the region's ability to forge multi-jurisdictional agreements that are perceived as being fair by all stakeholders," the Forum said in its December report.

We're not sure about the use of the word "agreement," but  — intentionally or unintentionally — the Forum omitted the 1990s' most stunning example of a regional approach to solving a perceived problem, and the one that goes far to make its point: creation of the Southeast Wisconsin Professional Baseball Park District, the agency that built the 43,000-seat stadium with a leaky, broken roof and a cellar for its most prominent tenant.