GOP Senate isn't on same page as GOP Assembly on shared revenue. We all may be waiting on them

Looks like Republicans have some significant differences to figure out among themselves on this shared revenue bill.

Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu says his caucus will likely drop a requirement that Milwaukee County and the city approve a new sales tax via referendum as part of the GOP shared revenue bill.

That prompted Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to declare such a move could kill the bill.

The speaker’s comments Thursday came a day after he declared Assembly Republicans were done negotiating on the bill and the Senate could take it or leave it. The legislation cleared the Assembly last night, about 12 hours after Dem Gov. Tony Evers said he was optimistic he could reach a final deal on the bill with LeMahieu and Vos in the coming weeks.

LeMahieu was unfazed by Vos’ comments.

“There are two houses in the state Legislature. It’s unfortunate that he’s drawing a line in the sand now with his version of the bill now and stopping negotiations on a bill that not everybody is in agreement on,” LeMahieu said.

In fact, a hastily-called Senate committee hearing for tomorrow deals with the original version of the bill, and not the one that was amended and passed last week by the State Assembly. And that one only allows a local sales tax in both the City of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County if the voters approve of it.

Marquette professor Philip Rocco followed up an earlier analysis by examining the shared revenue bill that passed the Assembly, and says that while there is more money in it than before, it almost all goes to smaller communities. And while some of most idiotic conditions on the funds were taken out, many remain.

While the last-minute changes added brought the total amount of county and municipal aid in the Republican plan up to $311 million, that is still just over half the size of the aid package proposed by Gov. Tony Evers. Moreover, while Republicans deleted several “strings attached” to the aid that attracted public scorn — notably the illegal quotas on arrests and moving violations that were part of the plan’s “maintenance of effort” requirements — the vast majority of the restrictions in the initial legislation remained in place....

The old criteria for distributing municipal aid —which Evers’ plan would rehabilitate— relied largely on “aidable revenues,” a measure based on local governments’ net revenue effort, their per capita property wealth, and population.

In the initial version of their bill, Assembly Republicans’ formula for municipal aid relies exclusively on population, but assigns a slightly larger multiplier to communities with populations under 5,000. The new legislation doesn’t really change that basic structure. But it adds a specific formula for aid to municipalities with between 30,000 and 50,000 residents.

A trade-off for giving Milwaukee the chance to put in a sales tax is that the GOP bill gives the state's largest city the lowest % increase in shared revenue, and Rocco adds that Milwaukee County does much worse under the GOP bills than they do with Evers' original shared revenue bill.

There is something to be said about changing a formula that has largely been based on the same factors for decades. But let's not kid ourselves - the reason the smaller communities are getting bigger boosts in this bill is because Republicans are more likely to represent those areas. Which yet again proves that Republicans care less about how much is being spent as much as they want to send those tax dollars to their communities while not having it go to THOSE PEOPLE in bigger cities that are more likely to vote Democrat.

However, the Republicans in the Legislature still need to figure a bill that works for both the Assembly and the Senate, and they sure aren't on the same page about this bill as it is. And if those two houses can't figure out a bill that works, do we see that bleed over into a long-term budget stalemate, like we did with Robbin' Vos and Scott Fitzgerald in 2017, which kept the state budget from being passed until mid-September?

Given that 2023 Republicans are outright terrible at anything resembling governance, I'm getting skeptical that they can get anything done in the next month, and that this devolves into a intra-GOP waiting game on something that we all agree needs to be fixed. Or if there is a bill, it'll be so inequitable and filled with poison pills that Gov Evers should rip it up and come back with something legitimate.

I understand that beggars can't be choosers, and I'd recommend signing a bill that even put some conditions on Milwaukee and had a small amount of giveaways to cops (I'd tie the sales tax to pensions and public safety, and call it a day). But let's see what comes out of this Senate hearing tomorrow, and in discussions in the coming weeks on this shared revenue bill. I think it's as important as any part of the state budget, but now it seems like it can go a lot of ways, especially now that it is outside of the budget.