GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – After years of plugging budget holes with one-time revenue sources, the city of Green Bay plans to raise property taxes to the highest it can under state law.
“It hurts and it’s going to hurt for a while, but everyone is sharing the pain equally,” said Bill Galvin, a Green Bay Alderperson.
On a home assessed at $150,000, the city portion of the property tax bill will be going up about $21.
That’s on top of Mayor Jim Schmitt asking city department heads to cut their proposed budgets 4 percent compared to last year.
Schmitt tells FOX 11 it’s a tough call.
“I want to say we’ve had some reduction in revenues. Personal property taxes were eliminated, some of the reassessments of manufacturing, that comes from the state, decreased as well.”
The city’s finance and personnel committees went through Schmitt’s proposed budget Tuesday night.
Green Bay Police Chief Andrew Smith told the committees his department won’t fill several openings to combat the cuts, including 14 sworn officer positions.
“So what we’re trying to do to try to mitigate all this is move as many people as we can from inside the building, administrative positions, consolidating jobs, and pushing people back out in the field.”
Before the meeting, a few city leaders told FOX 11 they weren’t concerned about residents losing services as a result of this budget.
However, during the meeting, Fire Chief David Litton painted a different picture, explaining the fire department won’t be able to staff an ambulance on the far east side, increasing emergency response times.
“There is no easy fix for this. I’m not asking for you to plug money back into the budget because I know where we stand.”
Litton says having the ambulance at Station 7, on Humboldt Road, has decreased average response times by about 2 and a half minutes.
“If there were any way that we could find money for that, I would be doing that,” said Barbara Dorff, a Green Bay Alderperson. “We all would be doing that and there just isn’t.”
Schmitt says the property tax increase has nothing to do with this being his final year in office.
“It would have been easy for me to just take the money out of savings and say look I’ll give everybody what they want and reduce the city savings account, but we need to have a savings account here. This is a budget like I’m going to be here next year. I said that years ago when people asked if I’m going to run again. My budget is something I’d hand over to my kids. It’s a realistic budget that the departments can live with.”
The full city council is expected to take a vote on the budget Monday.
