County Executive Chris Abele makes a last-minute appeal for a wheel tax.

Executive is determined to avoid cutting services

Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele appears to have made a New Year’s resolution to raise the county wheel tax to $60 in 2018.

Abele certainly is resolved to avoid looming cuts in social services and is trying his best to convince the public the County Board is filled with Scrooge-like misers for approving them in the first place.

Abele’s administration is making a last-minute appeal for the board to restore all of the $15.7 million worth of spending cuts it made in his recommended 2018 budget and to take that action before Jan. 1, the start of a new budget year.

County Board Chairman Theodore Lipscomb Sr. said he does not support Abele’s plan to give county residents a $60 wheel tax for the holidays.

“I remain opposed to doubling the wheel tax and think he deserves a lump of coal for continuing to ignore the will of the voters,” Lipscomb said in a statement.

By an overwhelming margin of 72% to 28% in a spring advisory referendum, county voters rejected a total $60 wheel tax — a $30 increase — to help pay costs of public transit and major transportation projects.

The administration wants county residents to know it is not responsible for and does not support any of the spending cuts resulting from the board’s budget action to keep the wheel tax at $30.

“The county board wanted to make cuts but didn’t want to take the political heat for making the cuts,” Administrative Services Director Teig WhaleySmith said Wednesday. Abele recommended a $30 increase in the vehicle registration fee, to a total of $60, and was willing to take the heat for that, he said.

“We don’t want to make any of these cuts,” Whaley-Smith said. Even so, the administration is required to implement the budget on Jan. 1.

The administration had repeatedly warned the board where the budget ax would fall to achieve those cuts but the board followed Lipscomb’s lead in trimming spending instead of approving the wheel tax increase, according to Whaley-Smith.

Among services getting hit by the cuts: homeless shelters lose $200,000 of county support; the Uplift Milwaukee Workforce Development Initiative that targets neighborhoods with the highest unemployment loses its entire $250,000 budget and will be eliminated; multiple bus routes would be eliminated; the Schultz Aquatic Center in Lincoln Park would be closed with the loss of its $232,246 budget.

“We want to give the board another opportunity to reverse course and prevent these cuts,” before the administration has to implement the budget in a few weeks, Chief of Staff Raisa Koltun said.

Koltun asked the board to schedule a special finance committee meeting Thursday to restore the spending cuts. That step would have been necessary to bring the proposal before the full board at its final 2017 meeting Thursday.

No committee meeting was scheduled Thursday and there will not be one before the end of the year for reconsideration of the 2018 budget, Supervisor Peggy West, the committee chair, said Wednesday.

The board adopted a $1.15 billion budget for 2018 on a 15-3 vote in November. The final budget removed all revenue that would be generated by a $30 increase in the wheel tax, an estimated $14.7 million next year, and cut proposed spending by $15.7 million.

Revenue necessary for the unlikely about-face required for supervisors to restore all those cuts would need to come from somewhere other than the property tax.

The county’s $6 million contingency fund, or rainy day account, is one possible pool of money to restore some cuts, administration officials said.

Koltun proposed an increase in the vehicle registration fee, or wheel tax, in an email this week to supervisors.

“We will move forward with restoring the budget cuts for which you provide funding,” Koltun told supervisors in the email.

Taking dollars out of the contingency account reduces funds available to respond to emergency expenses in 2018.

“Abele’s proposal to raid and drain the county’s rainy day fund or double the wheel tax instead of cutting administrative waste like we’ve asked is not an acceptable substitute,” West said in responding to the end-of-the-year push by the administration.

Removing the $14.7 million in revenue that would have been generated by the higher wheel tax required spending cuts of that amount and the final budget did that in two steps.

First, supervisors trimmed $11 million by removing several major road construction and improvement projects, delaying transit bus and fleet vehicle replacements and delaying a planned replacement of the county’s aging telephone and voicemail systems.

Second, an additional $3.7 million in spending was removed from the budget by approving 0.75% across-the-board cuts for departments. Another $1 million was cut from other programs.