On August 13th, voters in the Minocqua area will have a new referendum question to answer on their ballots in the upcoming partisan primary.
This election, Minocqua is asking voters to raise levy limits by $750,000 for the coming year and every year moving forward.
If passed, the increase on the Town portion of Minocqua property owners’ tax bill will be about $39 per $100,000 in assessed value.
This is the third time in the last 18 months that the town of Minocqua has asked its constituents to go above the levy limits.
Levy limits provide caps on the maximum amount a town, village, city, or county may take for property taxes.
Billy Fried, town supervisor of Minocqua, explained that they can’t keep up with the inflated costs of the goods and labor that the community has come to depend on.
“Infrastructure is a main priority for the tax levy money and maintaining and constructing and rebuilding roads. The cost of asphalt for a mile of a road has gone from $100,000, as little as seven years ago, to $330,000 or more. Our last bid was actually more than $330,000 per mile,” he explained.
That doesn’t even touch annual maintenance costs, which are necessary after Wisconsin winters.
“Some people get confused that the way it's written. They perceive it being a $750,000 increase on top of itself each year. It is not. It is taking the levy limit numbers, which were imposed in 1992 I believe, and it allows us to exceed that formula,” said Fried.
In March, Minocqua’s referendum question proposed raising the levy limits by $900,000.
Their last referendum failed by only 12 votes, so the town board is hopeful that a slightly smaller amount may be more palatable to voters.
“I totally get and I've had people say to me, ‘I don't care what it's for. I don't want to pay another dollar in taxes than I need to.’ I understand that, but to be able to keep the community at the level, or keep improving our community, which in turns, allows taxpayers to have a valuable asset in their properties,” he explained.
Fried said that in previous referendums, the town was also considering purchasing some properties, which he thinks made for bad timing.
Fried says if it doesn’t pass, they will have to make sacrifices.
“That's one of the things people always ask, ‘Well, what will be cut?’ I can tell you my priorities of maintaining the roads and law enforcement in our community, but others may have stronger feelings to try to maintain library and other services that we might look at cutting back on, and it has to be a majority vote by the five people on our town board,” he explained.
He says a ‘yes’ vote will mean the town can maintain and hopefully improve their services, while a ‘no’ vote will lead to severe sacrifices.
