More opponents than supporters in initial public feedback on potential Madison budget referendum – Isthmus

Debate about a contentious proposal to place a $22 million referendum brought some former city officials back into the fray. 

Mary Bottari, the former chief of staff to Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway, testified at the Aug. 6 Madison city council meeting in favor of a budget referendum that would ask voters to help plug a $22 million budget gap. 

“The city’s structural deficit has been around since 2000,” Mary Bottari told the council. “It’s due basically to two dynamics: a rapidly growing city and harsh restrictions on revenue in the Legislature.”

Bottari, along with former Alds. Shiva Bidar-Sielaff, Denise DeMarb and Matt Phair were identified in a May 11 email from Sam Munger, Rhodes-Conway’s current chief of staff, as affiliated with “Friends of the City of Madison.” 

Friends groups usually help raise money or provide volunteers for a cause, like the Friends of Madison Public Library. But Bottari says in an interview that the group is “just a group of people who got together because we thought the city might be facing a referendum.”

Former Madison Mayor Paul Soglin, who served in the position from 1973 to 2019, also testified.

“We’re all rather horrified at the two alternatives that have been presented for this financial crisis,” said Soglin, who advised the city council to lobby the state Legislature more aggressively. “In fact, there’s a far superior choice that brings economic justice and an opportunity for the city to right some of the wrongs we’ve heard discussed regarding the state Legislature.”

In an interview after the meeting, Soglin said that he was opposed to the referendum. “It’s unnecessary,” he said. Soglin believes that the city should close this year’s budget gap using its rainy day fund and lobby the state Legislature next year for sales tax authority and increased payments for municipal services for state properties in Madison.

Supporters of a $22 million budget referendum that would prevent sweeping cuts across the city’s departments outnumbered opponents at the meeting (20-5), but if written comments are included, 90 registrants were opposed, with 61 in favor, according to Dylan Brogan, city communications manager. Ten registrants neither supported nor opposed the referendum.

Those who supported the referendum said it would stave off painful staff cuts, preserve valuable services, and allow the city more time to lobby at the state level for municipal finance change.

“I like that when my trash is old, somebody takes it. I like that if there’s a fire, someone puts it out,” Madison resident Jacob Owca told the council. “And if there’s an emergency, there are cops to call — I want all of those utilities to have appropriate funding.”

But Michael Odden, a lifelong Madison resident, told the council the city’s referendum would add yet another cost in a city that is becoming increasingly unaffordable: “Rather than adjusting your spending aligned with regularly available revenue sources, you appear ready to open the genie’s bottle and rush to a referendum.”

According to city officials, the referendum would cover Madison’s operating budget deficit and allow the city to avoid further budget cuts or deficits until 2030. It would add $20 a month in costs to the average-cost Madison home and appear on the Nov. 5 ballot alongside two referendum questions for the Madison Metropolitan School District’s operating and capital budgets. 

Wisconsin cities have limited options for raising revenue: municipalities are prohibited by the state from levying sales taxes and raising levy limits without the approval of voters. Any special charges municipalities institute must be directly tied to and cannot exceed the service’s cost. 

At the request of Rhodes-Conway, city agencies submitted 5% budget cut proposals. If all the proposed cuts, released on Aug. 5, were implemented, there would be a 147-position reduction in the city’s workforce. To enact the targeted $6 million cut for 2025, around 60 positions would need to be cut. Around 25% of the cuts would be enacted in the city’s 2025 budget, with others phased in between 2026-29. 

The sweeping programmatic cuts proposed by agencies could lead to cutting Madison’s public libraries Sunday and evening hours by 16% and ending city funding at the Goodman Pool, for instance.

“We are already a lean organization that is striving to maintain pace with growing call volumes and requests for service,” Chris Carbon, city of Madison fire chief, argued in a July 19 letter to Rhodes-Conway outlining the fire department’s budget request that his agency has been prudent with spending. The department proposed cutting one fire engine and two of its Community Alternative Response Emergency Services teams, for an overall reduction of 23 positions. 

Other notable cuts: Metro Transit could eliminate most late night, Saturday or Sunday service ($800,000 and $1.2 million) or eliminate three routes ($700,000, $800,000 or $600,000). Madison’s police department would eliminate 53.6 full-time positions ($4,761,107) and reduce community-policing initiatives, including cutting the community outreach section, which would necessitate the repayment of a federal COPS grant. The city streets division would reduce brush collection from five to three times a year, and street repairs would be reduced by 52% ($1.4 million). 

Despite these proposed cuts, Lisa Veldran, a southwest Madison resident and former Madison city council administrator, told the council that the city has not sufficiently adjusted to its financial reality and continued to enact overspending budgets since municipal finance law changed in 2011. She called the taxes Madison residents already pay to the Madison school district, Dane County and Madison College, “untenable.”

“And now you say this referendum is the only way out, further putting the burden on the taxpayers in this city,” Veldran said. “I say shame on you and every elected official since 2011.”

But Noah Lieberman, a member of the city’s Landlord and Tenant Issues Committee who spoke in support of the referendum at the council meeting, has a different take. Lieberman told the council that “the cost of failure for passing this referendum is a cruel regressive tax on the least fortunate among us.”

Lieberman tells Isthmus that the three layoffs proposed by the city’s building inspection division — who enforce housing codes and can facilitate rent abatement — would exacerbate costs for those most in need: “Losing [building inspectors] now would only make the affordable housing crisis worse for Madison families struggling to get by.”

State restrictions on revenue-raising methods make Wisconsin an outlier in its reliance on property taxes. Wisconsin municipalities depend more heavily on property taxes than any other Midwest state, according to a 2019 report from the nonpartisan Wisconsin Policy Forum. And Madison’s combination of high property values and the state’s second largest municipal population give the city the third-lowest shared per-capita revenue payout in the state, according to a February 2024 Policy Forum report.

“All municipalities in general, in Wisconsin, are more reliant [than other states’ municipalities] on the property tax,” Jason Stein, research director at the Policy Forum, tells Isthmus. “Madison even more so, because some other communities like Milwaukee get a lot of revenue from state aid, and [for] Madison that’s much less the case.”

Soglin told the council that he thinks Madison should take advantage of potential shifts in the Legislature owing from Wisconsin’s redistricted state maps: “You are going to be dealing with Governor Evers, and you’re going to be dealing with a very differently constituted state government.” 

Though experts say the new legislative maps will make races more competitive, a flip in the Republican-controlled state Senate is unlikely. The state Assembly is more likely to see strong Democratic gains, but gaining majority control is also unlikely.

Soglin tells Isthmus that Milwaukee lobbied successfully to secure a 2023 deal permitting the city to levy a 2% sales tax; the city also is receiving increases in shared revenue payouts. In comparison, Soglin says, “Madison didn’t show up.” He says there needs to be more contact between Madison’s elected officials and state lawmakers: “It’s not good enough to go before the Joint Finance Committee, read a speech and then go home. Madison’s government relations program is so minor league compared to what other cities and what Milwaukee does.”

In response to Soglin, Brogan says that the city has been aggressively lobbying the state Legislature and notes that Evers held 13 special sessions to spend the state’s 2023 surplus with no support from Republicans. Each time, he adds, Republicans gaveled in and out “in a matter of seconds and without comment. That’s what the city of Madison is up against in terms of negotiating with the current leadership of the Legislature.”

Brogan says that city leaders are not standing down and is hopeful that a more “moderate” Legislature will be more likely to make changes.

“What we need is everyone who loves Madison — including any outspoken former mayors out there — to come together and put an end to the state Legislature punishing its capital city,” Brogan says. “Madison contributes mightily to Wisconsin’s economy, so this would benefit the entire state. Let’s stop taking potshots at each other and focus all of our efforts on that.”

Ald. MGR Govindarajan also pushed back on Soglin’s assertion that the city can rely on a reshaped Legislature.

“[Democrats] are not going to get the Senate, we might not even get the Assembly,” Govindarajan says. “I hope that we get a sales tax and a [regional transit authority]. The city has been asking for it for decades, but there is not enough changing at the state level fast enough for us to reliably rely on that to push a referendum [back] a year or something.”

Council members will vote in a virtual meeting Aug. 20 on whether to place the referendum on the Nov. 5 ballot.