While Scott Walker and Tom Barrett promise to hold the rate increases on your property taxes, Milwaukee Public Schools just did them one better. They will CUT your property tax rate by minus 0.8 percent.
School board members would love to take credit for this, but they did little directly to cause this tax cut. Neither did the recent health insurance agreement with the teachers’ union that will save the school district 45 to 50 million dollars. Nor did the millions the federal government poured into this nation’s schools to save jobs.
Yes, the school board would love to take credit for cutting your taxes, but Milwaukee taxpayers should continue to be mad at state government because you are still over paying on your property taxes. Here is how it works.
Wisconsin sets a strict rate for school districts. Spend a dollar more than the approved rate, and your school district will be cut in state aid the following year. But lower your taxes below the approved rate, and the same thing will happen. So a couple of years back, MPS did not to go to the state proved rate limiting the tax increase. How did the state reward MPS for its fiscal restraint? It cut state aid to MPS by six million dollars the following year.
The state school aid formula is based upon a combination of the property wealth and the number of students in the district. However, Milwaukee has been punished under this formula because of the school choice program.
MPS is required to pay for the school choice students out of its own revenues. Of course the amount going to choice schools for each child is far less than what MPS has been paying for children within regular MPS schools. But until recently, school choice was costing MPS millions because it was not allowed to count the choice students as part of its enrollment numbers for state aid.
Mayor Barrett acknowledged that Milwaukee taxpayers were paying an additional thousand dollars for each child in the choice program over what they would have to pay if the child was in MPS, but each choice child saved Wisconsin taxpayers three thousand dollars. A great deal for state taxpayers; a lousy deal for Milwaukee taxpayers.
Does the Milwaukee school board deserve any credit for lowering your tax burden this coming year? Yes. It told the public that the school system would be bankrupt in five years. The choice program was a contributing factor. (It didn’t have to wait for a report from someone else like Milwaukee County.)
Everyone panicked. Barrett and Doyle blamed MPS for fiscal mismanagement and commissioned a report on how MPS was spending it money. Barrett claimed there was a lot of “low hanging fruit” MPS could pick to lower costs in the district. But they never disputed that the school district was being unfairly burdened by the choice program.
In the end, the state legislature partially fixed the choice funding program which resulted in Milwaukee taxpayers seeing a decrease in school property taxes this year.
Before you get all gleeful on this tax reduction, understand that you have been overpaying on your property taxes for years, and you are still overpaying because of the choice program. The state only partially fixed the funding flaw. If the state would completely fix the flaw, Milwaukee taxpayers would see even further reductions in their property taxes.
Here is the new headline: “Milwaukeeans Continue to Overpay on their School Property Taxes.” Blame state government.
