GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – Green Bay residents are looking at 3.2% increase to the city’s tax rate.
For a $150,000 home, that would be an extra $43.50 for the city portion of your tax bill compared to last year
To get feedback on his first city budget, Mayor Eric Genrich is holding an open house on each side of Green Bay. Thursday night it was at Perkins Park.
“It’s important for us to make the difficult choices, some that haven’t been made in the past unfortunately.”
Genrich tells FOX 11 his priorities include adding five police officer positions, improving roads — to the tune of a more than 100% increase on blacktop and joint sealing spending, a diversity coordinator to improve inclusion among city employees, and a ‘resilience coordinator’ to deal with environmental issues, like flooding.
“There’s not a lot of fluff in this budget, certainly we’ve identified where we have our priorities and we’re trying to maintain services and make sure people are safe in this community.”
The police department has been operating 14 positions short of what it would like. Starting next July, five of those positions will be back on the force with a goal of cutting down on speeding and beefing up community policing.
“Officers are busy and they’re busy every single night,” said Commander Kevin Warych of the Green Bay Police Department. “They’re taking call after call after call and when you have more people, it’s just no different than any other city department, it spreads out the call volume and the workload for everyone.”
One department losing positions is Green Bay Metro Fire. Three firefighter jobs will stay unfilled.
City council member Randy Scannell tells FOX 11 he doesn’t see many other places where cuts can be made.
“To make any kind of significant change would require some significant cuts that I’m not prepared to make.”.
Genrich, a former state representative, says he’d like the state to find ways to give local municipalities more financial help.
“I’ve asked our state legislators to either return to the days when they provided substantial aid to local government or allow us for some flexibility in terms of local sales tax that the county has access to.”
The full city council will vote on the budget on November 5th.
There is one more budget open house coming up on Monday at Triangle Hill’s pavilion at 7 o’clock.
During the time FOX 11 was at Thursday’s open house, there were only three Green Bay residents present who were not an elected official or city employee.
If you want to read or learn more about the 2020 budget, click here.
