We are one county
Marathon County is a big county, but it is one county. We, as county residents, grow together. We succeed together.
That’s why we appreciate learning about Marathon County’s funding challenges in a 2050 longrange highway plan, but reject suggestions in the plan that would give greatest priority to urban corridors and least priority to low volume, rural roads.
We think all highways in the county’s 611-mile inventory should be maintained to the current high standard and, faced with looming funding shortages in the future, we say the county, after maximizing federal and state grant opportunities, should turn to the citizens for additional funding.
The highway study, conducted by North Central Regional Planning, is an excellent document, fully explaining a worsening funding situation over the next coming decades. The study explores, as it should, a number of options, but we reject those suggestions that the county should give greatest attention to Wausau metro urban county highways and least attention to rural highways.
The study suggests the county rank highway segments based on traffic volume and “land activity” that emphasizes employment. Higher ranked roads would get more maintenance dollars, while lower ranked roads would get less.
The suggestion is premised on a false understanding of what drives the county’s “economic engine.” It’s not all about employment. It’s also about production and trade. We agree that county highways should get people to their jobs in the county’s manufacturing and health care businesses, but it also needs to play a continued role in getting farm commodities to market. Agricultural foodstuffs are Wisconsin’s top outbound product for trade. They represent over 11 percent of product shipped across state lines. Farms don’t employ a lot of people, but they significantly impact the county’s economic balance sheet. They both need and deserve good transportation.
It’s better to think of Marathon County as a single, complicated, interconnected economy where rural and urban forces complement each other. The milk produced on a dairy located on a west county highway goes to a processing plant, such Mullins Cheese, located on a county road near the county’s center. You need a quality road near the dairy, where there is sparse employment, and a quality road at the plant, where employment is greater. It doesn’t make sense to cut corners on either side of the milk truck’s journey.
Experience has shown the county can’t rely on either state or federal government to provide adequate transportation dollars. Both governments love to keep highway departments as penniless paupers.
This means the county needs to be realistic and understand that it will need to increase property taxes or its vehicle registration fee (“wheel tax”) to keep up with the predicted inflated costs of maintenance. We calculate that it’s a horse apiece with either option. Making up a predicted $563,928 deficit in 2024 would cost the owner of a $173,000 median-priced house an extra $8.30 on his or her property tax bill.
Alternatively, the county could make up the shortfall by increasing the registration fee by $4.78. The cost is roughly the same, given that the average household in the county has two cars.
Things will get more expensive in 2050. The study predicts a $9,846,965 county highway deficit. That could be made up with a $145 increase in median property taxes or an $83 increase in the vehicle registration fee (which calculates to $163 per household). These charges have a bigger bite, admittedly. The other option is to let some county roads revert to gravel. That’s unacceptable.
The important thing, as supervisor John Robinson, Wausau, has pointed out, is not to balance the county budget by cutting needed highway maintenance.
All that does is postpone needed maintenance and lower future state transportation aids. The county board needs to master a difficult concept. That is, spending more money on roads now is spending less money in the future. Editorial by Peter Weinschenk, The Record-Review
