Tom Tiffany's constituents pay more to Oneida Co than 414 folks do under "tax hiker" Crowley?

As part of the annoying level of ads I see from the Hendricks/Uihlein PACs and Tom Tiffany campaign (as if there's a difference), there's some that try to call David Crowley some kind of tax hiker over his 6 years as Milwaukee County executive.

A big reason it's annoying because it refuses to admit that maybe Wisconsin's largest-population county by 400,000 people presents a unique situation. And perhaps many other parts of Wisconsin don't have the scale of fiscal needs and services that exist in all-urban and densely-populated Milwaukee County.

But it led me down a rabbit hole, because I wanted to see what taxes look like in Tom Tiffany's home county of Oneida and home town of Minocqua, because maybe it's not just David Crowley's Milwaukee County that has rising taxes in the 2020s. I'll use the Wisconsin Policy Forum's Property Values and Taxes database for much of this.

Let's start from 2020 itself, as that's when Crowley was first elected as Milwaukee County executive, and we can look at what has happened to property taxes in the County since then. The last budget under Chris Abele had a total county tax levy of just under $302 million, so what's happened to property taxes since then in the County.

So this is where the Uihlein PAC makes the argument of "David Crowley raised property taxes 5 times in 6 years". Sure, but as you can see, the tax levy for Milwaukee County was less in 2026 than it was in 2022. Pretty good when you consider how much costs and prices have gone up over those 4 years (and how much more they will go up with 2026's inflation).

Of course, a big reason for that is the 2023 shared revenue bill (aka Act 12) that allowed for Milwaukee County to institute a 0.4% sales tax (described as "nearly doubling" by the GOP oligarch PACs). Now, much of that 0.4% sales tax is to pay off pension obligations and there are other requirements on public safety staffing and other handcuffs, but enough funds were freed up to allow for the property tax cut in 2024 that you see.

Now let's step away from Milwaukee County and look at Tom Tiffany's home of Oneida County. And their have a similar trajectory, except their property tax cut is one year later, as Oneida County got a big boost in shared revenue under the bill for 2025 (more on that later).

I'll add that, Oneida County's property tax levy went up by 12.6% in the 3 years before their Act 12 assistance, while Milwaukee County only had its levy go up by 3.8% in the 3 years before it got its sales tax.

Given that Oneida County had a little over 38,000 people for much of the last 4 years and Milwaukee County was between 921,000+ and 924,000+ for those years, how do we best compare tax burdens? One way might be to see what these places pay on property taxes per capita, and when you do that, Oneida County residents pay nearly 50% more in property taxes to their County than Milwaukee County residents do, and that was true even before Milwaukee County's sales tax.

But at the same time, the county property tax rate is more than double in Milwaukee County than in Oneida. Although I will add that both have seen significant declines in the last 4 years as property values keep going up.

Which hints at a major difference between Oneida and Milwaukee Counties. There's a lot more property value to tax per person in Oneida County than in Milwaukee County, three times as much.

And while GOPs may cynically rip on Crowley for approving a higher sales tax for Milwaukee County, it's worth noting that Oneida County was getting a lot more sales tax per person from its 0.5% sales tax before 2024 than Milwaukee County was, as a function of the high amount of tourism that the Northwoods relies on. And even with the sales tax now being 0.9% in MKE Co, it barely puts Crowley's county ahead of Tiffany's on a sales taxes paid per capita basis.

Now the idea decades ago was that shared revenues were supposed to be some kind of equalizer for inequities like these, and that Milwaukee County should get a larger share because of all of the economic activity and income tax that it generates (counties cannot have its own income tax by Wisconsin law). Likewise, property rich counties like Oneida were supposed to not need as many shared revenues, because they could make up the difference without making their residents pay a large tax rate. But when state shared revenues to counties and municipalities were raised in 2023 for the first time since Scott Walker, Tom Tiffany and the GOP took control of state government and gerrymandered the Legislature, there was some rebalancing done.

Not surprisingly, this 2023 adjustment favored property-rich and/or rural counties. And to compensate for being allowed to raise a sales tax, both Milwaukee County and the City of Milwaukee had a much smaller increase.

Change in shared revenues post-Act 12
Oneida Co. +1,034.4%
Milwaukee Co. +16.2%

And while you might say "C'mon Jake, Milwaukee Co still got another $7.6 million while Oneida Co only got another $450,579." , on a per capita basis, Oneida County got 43.5% more in shared revenue than Milwaukee Co.

Lastly, David Crowley isn't the only candidate in the governor's race that signed off on raising a sales tax for his constituents. In 2015, Tom Tiffany approved of a state budget that allowed the Oneida County city of Rhinelander to put in its own 0.5% sales tax, as a way to help pay its bills without having to shove all the burden onto the property tax.

In addition, Tiffany represents Eagle River, which has had its own sales tax for 20 years, and Bayfield, which has had one for 23. And now Tiffany's own hometown of Minocqua has joined the club of 0.5% local sales taxes, even after a 275% boost in shared revenues the year before. But I don't hear Tom Tiffany or other WisGOPs complaining about Minocqua not being able to handle its own budget, so what's the difference?

(oh, we know the difference).

These are the numbers. I'm not even going to go much into the fact that Tom Tiffany and the rest of the WisGOPs approved of a tax writeoff in 2011 to manufacturers and ag businesses that is now likely to exceed half a bilion dollars a year....without requiring any job creation.

That $500 million a year could reduce property taxes for Wisconsin owners by approximately 3.75% (I'm using the LFB estimates of statewide property taxes). There's your property tax freeze right there, without blowing a hole in the budget.

I guess my main point is - if Tom TIffany and other WisGOPs want to get on David Crowley for Milwaukee County's tax situation, maybe he and the rest of them should look in their back yards and realize that a lot of local governments are still dealing with financial issues. And that a lot of Wisconsinites have higher tax burdens than residents in the 414, possibly including Tom Tiffany himself. And that's largely because of WisGOP policies over the last 15 years, where they chose to give away things to their donors while passing the taxes down to local governments.