APPLETON, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – Appleton and Green Bay thought they had a wheel tax, but the public may need to have another vote.
If you live in an area where you pay an extra fee each time you register your car, you may soon be able to vote to do away with it. That’s thanks to Assembly Bill 283.
The bill would require local governments, wanting to impose a wheel tax to go to a referendum first.
If the bill does pass, it will also require municipalities, like Appleton that already have a wheel tax in place, to go back, create a referendum and ask the voters what they think.
“The more power we can put directly in the hands of the people, I think that calls for good government, whether it’s at the state level or local level,” said state Representative Shae Sortwell, R-Two Rivers.
Appleton Mayor Tim Hanna tells FOX 11 it’s not so much giving voters the power that he has a problem with, rather, it’s the state robbing the city of theirs that isn’t sitting well.
“Clean up your own house. Get your nose out of our business, and clean up your own house. Here is the hypocrisy in this bill: Is the state having a referendum on their increase fees? I will gladly have a referendum, as soon as the state has one on their fees that they are choosing to increase.”
State Senator André Jacque, R-De Pere, is among the six senators cosponsoring the bill. He tells FOX 11…
“It deserves quite a bit of forethought and consideration. As long as you’re doing that, it should not be a burden to have a referendum in a regularly scheduled way.”
Nearly half of the 25 municipalities in the state imposing a wheel tax are in our viewing area.
Appleton and Green Bay are among them.
The City of Appleton’s common council approved its $20 fee close to five years ago.
“This wasn’t a grab for more money for us to do infrastructure,” explained Hanna. “We very well could do that, but we didn’t; we replaced another fee with it.”
That fee it replaced was a special assessment fee.
Hanna says if the city is forced to put the wheel tax on a referendum and it fails, that fee would be back in play.
“We would go back to assessing the fee or the assessment that everybody hated because we wouldn’t have a choice. The choice we don’t have is to not do infrastructure.”
The special assessment fee is the same one many in Grand Chute are being charged right now to fix their streets.
It would mean if you lived on a street that’s being worked on, you’d be seeing a bill, possibly in the thousands, for it.
With the current wheel tax, the cost of those repairs is, instead, split among everyone in the city, coming out to a little more than $1 a month.
But Sen. Jacque says this bill isn’t going to take away any wheel tax.
“It simply requires that it would have to have popular support to remain.”
Assembly Bill 283 has been referred to the Committee on Transportation.
