Wheel tax proposal axed in Shawano County
It would have added a $20 annual registration fee for every vehicle that stays in Shawano County. Officials say that there's about 37,350 vehicles countywide that fit this criteria and that it would have generated about $747,000 for the county. County officials could have used that money for road projects.
Supervisors said the wheel tax proposal was tremendously unpopular with their constituents.
'I just didn't like it from the very start, and the more we got into it and the more people we talked to, (we knew) it wasn't going to go anywhere,' said county supervisor Martin Elmer.
City of Shawano residents already pay a $40 wheel tax. They would have had to pay the county wheel tax on top of the existing $40 fee from the city. Some residents have said they feel like this would be double taxation and wouldn't be fair.
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The wheel tax proposal went through several committees before landing in front of the full board on Wednesday afternoon. For a full list of municipalities in the state of Wisconsin that have a wheel tax, please click here.
Now that it hasn't passed, county administrative coordinator Jim Davel said they'll likely have to fill in holes in their budget. He said in many areas, state funding has remained stagnant as costs for different services the county offers have risen.
'I think the long-term plan is to work with the state legislature,' he said. 'The state doesn't react fast enough to the impacts on the ground and that really hurts the counties across the board.'
He said although there's been some recent new sources of state funding like Act 12, it's not nearly enough to cover all the expenses in a county's budget especially when costs have risen so significantly.
Davel said he's confident that the county will still be okay even without the additional revenue that the wheel tax would have created.
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'We did borrow last year to maintain that (highway department projects) and we will continue to do what we have to do to have our safe and reliable network (of roads),' Davel said.
'For us, it was like putting a band-aid on a big cut,' Elmer said when describing what the wheel tax would have done if it supervisors had given it the thumbs up. 'What we need long term is something out of Madison, to give us the funds we need to support our county.'
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