In the Race

Mayor Taylor:  Are we on the issue? 

Unidentified:  I think Alderman Sohns is leading up to it.

Laughter from one of the Councilmen and cross-talk.

Mayor Taylor:  The reason I did Alderman is because the City Attorney has permission to beat me up if I’m getting off track.

Unidentified Alderman:  Not me bro.

Alderman Sohns: I went to the Assessor’s Office and I pulled the assessed valuation of the seven members of  Council at the time; that would include Kosovich and Hammelman.  Alderman Wilhelm and Taylor were not part of this.  So you see the Council members identified as…

Taylor:  Alderman Sohns, the Clerk is asking that you speak into the microphone

Sohns:  O.K.  I also pulled the assessment records for six of the bloggers.  And if you look at these sheets I ran them up to what the property taxes bills would have been, this is City of Franklin taxes now, for three years and five years, and the results are summarized on the first sheet.  There’s a couple of outliers, and by that I mean, we have a couple of folks who saw changes in their assessments because they made improvement to their property, one of my colleagues made significant improvements to their property in 2006, his assessment was approximately double what the average was for the city.  Councilman number 7, is me.  My wife and I remodeled our home and so our home was reassessed as a consequence saw an increase last year.  The last one is blogger number 4 and that was a home that was not fully assessed in 2006 and so you can’t a 3-5 year history given the short lifespan of the history.  If you remove those outliers and you look at the average of the rest, the average three year increase of these folks who I studied here was $63.38, a little better than twenty bucks a year.  The percent increase 4.3 about half the consumer point price index.  This is in a period of time when the City’s total assessed value increased almost 40%.  Our expenditures increased 27.6 % and our tax levy went up 15.8%.  We’ve actually done a pretty darn good job managing our finances; I make no apologies for the tax levies that I voted for.  This last tax levy I had reservations about whether or not as a matter of politics to demand a small decrease but when I did the arithmetic I said great on my $5,400 tax bill I’m going to reduce it ten bucks.  So I voted for the budget I admit I voted for every budget since I’ve been in office.  I make no apologies for it.  I think we’ve been doing a great job.  And I will say as a taxpayer, not as an Alderman, if my choice is to see police protection diminish, or response time by the fire department diminish, or the library have to be closed, or spend an extra twenty bucks here.  I’ll spend the extra twenty bucks.  How it turns out will determine what we determine at the end of the year when we have a budget when we put it together.  The levy limit, 3% is less than $600,000 last year on costs for an increased payroll and the payroll related expenses was a million dollars.  Alderman Solomon was […] finance Committee for a lot of years, he’s nodding his head up and down.  I don’t know how you’re going to pull this 3% rabbit out of a hat.  For three years in a row.  We’ll see.  As Alderman Olson pointed out, we’ve got the history in front of us.  History will tell us a little something about the future.  We’re going to have to decide.  We’re either going to uphold your pledge or we’re not.  Scott Walker put it […] 

Taylor:  Thank you for the compliment.  Just to mention that Scott Walker got 80% of the vote.

Sohns:  The other one is the School District.

Taylor  Alderman Solomon.

Alderman Solomon:

Again, thank you for the information, it’s the first I’ve seen it.  I will peruse through it at length.  Along with that goes the 5-year history that I assume was provided by staff.  Most of the people don’t realize this but throughout the last five years folks, we not only kept the taxes , what’s the average, Cal, Three over five year? 

Mr. Patterson:  2%

Solomon:  2% over five years.  We also took 200,000 per year out of the operation budget from landfill revenue out of the operation budget and put that on the tax rolls because what’s happened to our landfill revenue?  There isn’t any.  We anticipated that , the finance committee did five years ago, to get a million dollars off he tax rolls, that’s about 1.2% per year.  Per year!  For five years.  That’s another 6% reduction.  In other words your tax levy for property taxes has gone down over the last five years. 

Olson:  Two things. One is, I've taken a couple of implied hits here for my vote on the Finance Committee against the budget last year... I think it's our place to be a little more efficient, with all due respect to the staff who does a great job.  And then when it came time to vote at the Council level, each of us faces a decision.  We can be a part of a team, show support and move forward, which is what I chose to do, in light of the relative cost of a decision like that.  Or you can continue to be a rebel.  Well, I chose to go that route.  I don’t know if there is any benefit to me but we’ll see about that won't we.

Olson:  Mr. Sohns, as usual when you do things in a hurry, there’s a mistake.  The detailed spread sheets are the same in the both.  Which means when you look at the city of Franklin for your assessed value and all this and that…that all stays the same on both spread sheets, but the tax rate is always the city tax rate as opposed to the school tax rate. 

Mayor Taylor:  As long as you’re talking about the history here ….tax increases and tax increase is primarily tied to the growth of the city.  And that’s the equalized value  which I think is in one of these charts.  This year, I’m sure anyone who owns a home is wondering if they can sell their home for the same price they were able to sell it for last year.  We’re going to be having a Board of Review shortly, and my guess is there’s going to be a line all the way out the door of people saying that they’re going to want to have their assessed values reduced because the market value has fallen significantly. 

And our members that sit on the Board of Review are going to have to listen to the Assessors and their going to have to listen to the people .  It’s almost every day that you turn on the news and you hear the price of gas went from $350 to $3.75 to $3.80 to $4.00 a gallon and now we’re hearing that it will go to somewhere around $8.00 a gallon.  All of our constituents are getting hit by this.  Their all getting hit with major increases in health care and out of pocket costs and the price of bread has gone up the price of flour everything has gone up.  They will be coming to you because there’s a few people that were just elected like me that went out there and talked to all of the, well a lot of people of the community; the only thing I heard really, there was  a lot of things, but the only thing I really heard was taxes.  And while we have based our budgets on the growth and we say well O.K. we’ve got this much this year and we’ve got that much this next year, every community in Wisconsin, every community across the United States, is going to be tightening their belt, every business is going to be wondering how they’re going to service.  And your constituents are going to be calling you, our constituents are going to be calling us, and saying, “Do not raise my taxes needlessly”.  They’re going to be saying, “Well, maybe we don’t need that service.” 

I think some of you know, that I used to represent a lot of public employees and I was also management.  The Parks Department if I can from the Scott Walker play book used to have over 900 full time staff in the department.  I think they’re down to less than 200 […] and it’s all seasonal work force.  And you know what, there are certain areas that could look a lot better, but they’re almost getting the job done.  And the public has yet to say, we want you to increase the work force.  And it’s going to have a trickle down effect to us, if it hasn’t already.  And I’ll leave it open for the other people that just ran for office because that’s the only thing that I was hearing when I was running for office.  Alderman Taylor.

Alderman Taylor:  Well I campaigned.  When I was campaigning obviously taxes, taxes, taxes, it was what I heard all the time.  And you go to the little old lady, that cost of gas, the cost of groceries, the cost to heat her house, and they see 5.7... or 24% or 22% for 4 years.  This is ridiculous.  This is not what we should be doing.  And my thought, is I didn’t sign a tax pledge but I’m not going to vote on a budget that’s over 3%.  The Mayor can send one to us and we can do what we want, but at a committee level I won’t vote for it.  And if I won’t vote for it at the Finance Committee I’m not going to come to the Common Council meeting and vote for it just to go along.  Maybe I'll be the one rebel.

Mayor Taylor: Alright no motion was requested on this information.  Mr. Patterson.

Mr. Patterson:  Just a couple pieces of information.  The item that you’ve got labeled G-7, the top part of is on the web site.  The bottom part of it is tax levy units calculation. […]  Second point, this big document is a reference document I put it together so that we could get it to the Finance Committee in May.

Mayor Taylor: The City Attorney is reminding me that we are getting a little bit off of the Agenda since your talking about the future. 

[…]

Mayor Taylor:  Alright let’s turn to Item 8 Request from Board of Health to appear at July 8, 2008 Committee of the Whole

Alderman Wilhelm:  So Moved.