Put Up Or Shut Up

Don't count on it.

Two weeks from today, voters in the City of West Bend will have an opportunity to suggest funding solutions for street maintenance. They shouldn’t miss the chance. Goodness knows, they haven’t missed any chance on Facebook and Twitter to complain about the condition of our streets. But talk is cheap, and our Common Council knows it. The city recently hosted three public input sessions to get a better understanding of these complaints, and a grand total of five people attended. So, on April 3 the referendum on street maintenance is only an advisory referendum—i.e., the city will be under no obligation to act on the results.

The city would like you to know that it already spends at least $1,000,000 a year on maintenance, and that the amount is increasing by 4% every year. And that sounds like a lot of money until you divide it by approximately 500 lane miles of city streets. Fortunately, not every mile needs repair every year, but that’s little consolation if the miles that need repair now are the miles you need to travel. West Bend’s streets are atrocious. What’s a voter to do?

Here are your choices:

• Increase property taxes by approximately $640,000—approximately 23 cents per $1,000 of assessed value—to apply to borrowing that can be used for roads.
• Increase property taxes by approximately $1,200,000—approximately 46 cents per $1,000 of assessed value—to apply to borrowing that can be used for roads.
• Implement a $20 vehicle registration fee (wheel tax) to apply exclusively to road-designated borrowing.
• Support an agreement between Washington County and its municipalities, in which the county would share up to 25% of its sales tax revenues (approximately $600,000 for West Bend) to apply to road-designated borrowing.

Good luck with that last one. The county has already rejected the idea.

What, then, can we do with the first three referendum choices? Not much. The first two suffer from an all-too-familiar problem: they raise taxes without guaranteeing that the new revenue will be used for its intended purpose. The $20 vehicle registration fee is the only choice that does. As District 5 Alderman Rich Kasten explained in his January 3 letter to the Common Council, “While the ‘wheel tax’ has negative connotations, it is currently the only solution that designates funds explicitly for road projects. We cannot bind future councils to property tax increases being used for road projects.”

A municipal wheel tax is going to be a tough sell. Like the first proposal, it would generate more than $600,000 of new revenue per year. But vehicle owners already pay an annual state registration fee of $75, and it’s only a matter of time before that goes up.

It’s fair to ask where this will end. Will Washington County eventually come looking for its own wheel tax revenue, too? It’s also fair to ask when this will end. None of these proposals has a sunset date. Voting for any of them could lead to a tax increase that endures long after the immediate concerns about street maintenance have been addressed. And your choices don’t include an option that raises enough revenue by itself; in every case, the extra money becomes the city’s “down payment” on projects it will go further into debt to finance.

Putting more money into our streets would make them better for everybody, and that includes cyclists. There are a few streets that I avoid because their seams and potholes are so jarring. I can somewhat compensate with wider tires at lower pressure. After several days in a row on my road bike, I recently hopped aboard my cyclocross bike for a ride around town. Right now, my cyclocross bike is outfitted with 700x32 slicks at 60 psi. The difference in comfort between that setup and my road bike—700x25 tires at 100 psi—was remarkable. But it shouldn’t be up to me to adjust to the shortcomings of public infrastructure. Imagine asking motorists to get new tires that are more suitable for our rough streets!

I predict the referendum will come to nothing. Turnout will be low, the public will continue to make ill-informed complaints via social media, the city will have discharged its responsibility merely by asking the questions, and we will go on as before.