County Board approves fee increases

The budget includes hikes at the zoo, in transit fares and at pools, golf courses and elsewhere.

The Milwaukee County Board on Monday adopted a final $1.188 billion budget for 2019, an increase of more than $39.6 million, or 3.4 percent, from this year’s spending plan.

The 2019 budget includes increases in admission charges at the Milwaukee County Zoo and some transit fares, as well as higher fees at golf courses, pools and aquatic centers, dog exercise areas, and marinas.

For the first time, both outdoor and recreational vehicle campsites will be made available at certain parks in 2019.

The county property tax levy to help pay for next year’s budget is set at $294.4 million, an increase of more than $1.5 million, or 0.54 percent, from 2018. The final levy is below the state-imposed cap and is expected to result in a slight decrease in the county’s share of residential property taxes when those bills are mailed in December, officials said.

The property tax rate needed to generate the 2019 levy is $4.89 per $1,000 of equalized valuation, down 15 cents from this year.

The budget was adopted on a 17-1 vote, with Supervisor John Weishan Jr. the lone vote against it. The board added nearly $1 million in spending to the $1.187 billion budget recommended by County Executive Chris Abele.

The nearly unanimous vote was unprecedented in his 20-year tenure on the board, said Supervisor Jim Schmitt, chairman of the board’s finance committee.

“Today the County Board adopted a balanced and responsible budget that preserves essential services for our citizens and signals a new era of collaboration on Milwaukee County’s biggest challenges,” Board Chairman Theodore Lipscomb Sr. said.

“Balancing the Milwaukee County budget becomes more difficult each year due to state limits on our revenue, and we face a real crisis in the near future without a solution to this issue,” Lipscomb said.

Next year’s budget follows through on plans to begin constructing bus rapid transit service between downtown Milwaukee and the Milwaukee Regional Medical Center in Wauwatosa and it preserves the current Route 61 JobLines bus service into Waukesha County, as a reconfigured Route 57, through August 2019.

Lipscomb gained board approval for his proposal to begin purchasing battery electric buses for the rapid transit service.

Lipscomb and several other supervisors said the task ahead for the board and the Abele administration is to go to Madison and seek “a fair deal” from the Legislature for a boost in shared revenue payments.

As income, sales and other taxes collected by the state have steadily increased in the past decade, the state has not increased the revenue it is returning to local governments, according to Abele and Lipscomb.

“We all know that this budget is a temporary fix and that our work toward long-term solutions has only begun,” Abele said. “I look forward to working with leaders in Milwaukee County, in other counties and in state government toward solving the major fiscal challenges that we all face.”

Four state reimbursement payments to Milwaukee County — general transportation aid, basic community aids, shared revenue and mass transit operating assistance — have been held stagnant since cuts were made in 2010 and 2011, county budget officials have said.

Receiving inflationary increases for those four payments since 2010 would have provided the county with $35 million more in 2019 than it is projected to receive from the state.