The end of an era
The Marathon County Board of Supervisors will vote May 24 over whether to sell $24,165,000 in general obligation bonds to finance its capital improvements plan. We expect the bond resolution to pass easily without controversy or debate.
In taking the vote, the board, however, ought to observe a solemn moment of silence. That’s because selling those bonds supervisors will close out an era, indeed, even a way of life.
Since 1991, the county board has used a procedure to pay for capital items, which include building roofs, park restrooms, box culverts, parking lots, horse barns and other things. The board gathered surplus money from a past budget year and asked a committee, which included citizen members, to rank requested items with an elaborate point system. The highest ranking items were funded. The lowest regarded items were not.
County finance director Kristi Palmer delivered a brief eulogy for this county capital policy at last week Wednesday’s Finance, Property and Human Resources Committee meeting. “It [the policy] served us well,” she said. “That is how we got things done.”
The capital improvement policy did not come out of thin air. It evolved within a county board that included a number of farmers, including dairy producers, who prided themselves on living within their means and were horrified by debt. These supervisors lived this fiscal conservatism in their walk, their talk and in their burly handshake.
This rural sensibility born of the small dairy producer will now sunset. Marathon County, like so many other counties around the state, will finance its budget not only with cash in hand, but with a bank note bearing interest.
There are plenty of good reasons to junk the capital improvements policy. The primary one is that the county isn’t getting needed things done.
The county identified for years the need to patch the headquarters library roof in Wausau and prop up the sagging floor in the county’s jail’s second floor within the courthouse. The two projects, however, never got enough points in annual rankings. The problems at these buildings compounded and the inevitable fix was more expensive than if the county would have addressed the issues earlier.
County board chairman Kurt Gibbs said the county needed to assume debt to take care of things that any normal homeowner would. “You are not going to wait around to fix a roof with water buckets filling up in your living room,” he said.
From one perspective, it is amazing that Marathon County should have to borrow any money to update the jail floor, maintain an elevator or remove asbestos at North Central Health Care. Since 1991, the taxable value of Marathon County has grown from $3 billion to $12.7 billion. In that same time frame, county property taxes have increased from $16.7 million to $63.5 million. With this increased tax haul, why can’t the county find cash to repair the parking lot at Mission Lake or fix the road that leads to Big Eau Pleine Park?
But this is the case. The county, which has tried for years to curtail spending through prioritybased budgeting, is in a constant budget crisis. Without a consensus to cut services and programs, the county board has for years turned to debt and other revenues, such as a vehicle registration fee, to pay the bills.
The state is largely to blame here. Under the state’s levy limit law, the county has had to cut its 1991 tax rate of $5.87 per thousand dollars of property to $4.55 this past year. If the county were able, under law, to charge county taxpayers this same 21-year-old tax rate, it would have $16.9 million to use to pay for capital items. That would likely be plenty.
The state could not trust Marathon County’s rural conservatives to do the right thing. So, the right thing now is for Marathon County to borrow money to fix buildings and roads. A farm-inspired imperative to avoid debt now fades into history.
It feels like we are walking backwards, not forward.
Editorial by Peter Weinschenk, The Record-Review
