River News: Our View

The Oneida County board is all set to take up and pass a 5-percent property tax increase for the 2024 budget, a prospect that should make none of us happy when our pocketbooks are already battered by high inflation and Bidenomics.

And it doesn’t. It should make everyone even angrier because it is an entirely avoidable tax increase. In fact, if the county were responsible, it would reduce taxes. But acting responsibly is not a characteristic of the modern age.

Especially in Oneida County.

So we advise our Lakeland area supervisors to vote against the budget package next week precisely because it is irresponsible to raise taxes in an inflationary economy, though we know they won’t have the courage to do so. Courage is another characteristic sorely missed in the modern age.

Especially in Oneida County.

That said, we would be remiss if we did not give credit where credit is due, and, the truth is, some progress is being made at the county level. These are baby steps, mind you, but steps are steps, and so we’ll give a tip of the hat this week to county board chairman Scott Holewinski for helping the county take a few tentative steps forward during his tenure so far.

The hat tip doesn’t stop there, either. How about a round of applause for sheriff Grady Hartman and social services director Mary Rideout for their work to finally shelve the long-deficient Human Services Center (HSC) and put the county on a path that will both protect taxpayer interests and serve the populations who depend on the HSC for developmental and behavioral health services.

We have watched as Mr. Hartman and Ms. Rideout have sought internal solutions and then, when that failed, took the bold actions they needed to take to fulfill the county’s mission to serve its population. 

Folks, this is how government should work.

More on that, but let’s circle back for a bit to the proposed budget. What is most significant since Mr. Holewinski took the reins of the board chairmanship is the balancing of the operational budget without dipping into the general fund.

The latter was the signature policy of former chairman Dave Hintz. Every year the spending increased, every year Hintz caved to progressive demands that sent expenditures soaring past revenues, and every year the board ended up tapping nonrecurring balances to pay for recurring expenses.

It’s like depending on a year-end bonus to pay for your monthly car payment. In other words, don’t try it at home unless you want to lose your car or your house.

But everybody went along because Mr. Hintz was supposed to have been some kind of CPA-type wizard for Exxon, and maybe he was, but who trusts any big corporation and their minions? These days, corporate America has gone from being just a den of thieves to a nest of woke whackos, and warmonger whackos at that.

Turns out, the Oneida County board, at least most of them, drank the Kool-Aid year after year.

Anyway, Mr. Holewinski got rid of that bad habit, and he is blunt about the upcoming budget’s tax increase, even to the point of cautioning taxpayers not to swallow the old bait-and-switch line that the tax rate is falling significantly so hooray for us! It is falling, but that’s irrelevant to your pocketbook because it’s based on a rise in the state’s calculated property valuations in the county. 

The truth is, while it’s tempting to compare the tax rate for last year with the tax rate for the coming year, tax rates are not useful indicators in determining whether taxes are rising or falling. That’s because, when property valuations rise quickly, municipal governments can often increase spending and still show a lower tax rate, thereby cloaking tax increases. 

The economist Milton Friedman liked to say that the amount you’re paying in taxes — now or later — is the amount of money the government is spending: “Keep your eye on one thing and one thing only — how much government is spending. … If you’re not paying for it in taxes, you will pay for it through inflation or in the form of government borrowing.”

Taking Friedman to heart, the number to keep your eye on in Oneida County is the amount of money Oneida County will be spending next year — more than $5 million more than in 2023, in fact, with the tax levy rising by $861,000. 

With higher valuations, a higher tax bill might be cosmetically covered because of higher assessments and market value, but it’s still a higher tax bill. And while higher valuations can recede when the economy turns down, enacted taxes do not go away. The lower tax rate is lipstick on a pig.

So pay attention to what the county is spending, which is an addiction the county can’t seem to rehab out of. If it could, we wouldn’t be staring down the barrel of a tax increase, but at least Mr. Holewinski knows what the roots of the spending addiction are, like employing too many people, and wants to do something about it.

The county now employs even more people than it did 12 years ago, significantly so, and that was a time when government at all levels in Wisconsin was bloated from the overspending years of Gov. Jim Doyle and his Democratic porksters. In other words, 12 years of GOP stewardship at the state level has done nothing to corral the galloping government of Oneida County.

As today’s budget story reports, at least Mr. Holewinski knows where to attack the problem, and he knows something else: While the 2024 county budget report tries to paper over long-term government overgrowth by attributing it to inflation, it’s really the permanent numbers of workers and programs that pose the bigger threats, not transient inflation.

All of which brings us back to Mr. Hartman and Ms. Rideout. County taxpayers should feel good that these two public servants are leading the county’s refashioning of its delivery of critical behavioral and developmental health services, for they have both been great stewards of their respective departments over the years.

And that’s why, when conservatives begin to call for reducing county personnel — as they should — they should not put the sheriff’s department or the social services department in the crosshairs.

Our beef with county government is not with core services — as law enforcement, social services, and highways are — but with those programs and services that serve no core function and should be jettisoned, and with those departments that have gone rogue.

We have long argued that true conservatism does not mean whacking programs across the board but simply those that government has no business being involved in. Core programs can always be fully funded and still compatible with low taxes if the government just cuts out the special interest and ideological gravy trains. 

There are plenty of the latter to cut down to size or eliminate. Speaking of dinosaurs, the UW Extension comes to mind. So does Land Conservation, though we suppose that department keeps the aesthetic radicals in a little playground where they can shovel buckets of pristine sand and not get into too much trouble. 

Economic development also seems like something the private sector should be funding itself — government’s job is to keep taxes and regulations low to make the area attractive, not pick winners and losers, either in industry or location, through massive loans and subsidies.

And of course there is the big monster — planning and zoning, which should be reduced to a skeletal entity and allowed out of the house only on Halloween. Needless regulations and endless regulatory “oversight” continue to be a county obsession, and it kills both economic growth and affordable housing. 

Likewise, the public health department should aggressively be reformed and its woke army of government propagandists scattered to the winds, so that it provides only specific services to underserved populations. Or at least make Big Pharma pay for public health director Linda Conlon’s megaphone.

In the end, we hope the dismantling of the HSC is the dawn of a new day of free people in Oneida County, and not just an overnight dream. We believe it will save taxpayers many dollars as services are maintained, and it is time to similarly move forward on other items.

Lest we forget, the corporation counsel’s office needs to be downsized as well, because it is pretty obvious that corporation counsel Mike Fugle has so much free time on his hands that he can serve not only as the county attorney but as the zoning director, too.

We’re probably leaving out some egregious county expenditures, so to cover our bases let’s suggest laying off 10 percent of every agency that is not a core agency. We figure the county could reduce its workforce by 19 FTE positions just by doing that.

At the end of the day, Mr. Hartman and Ms. Rideout have an important part of the county’s mission under control. Mr. Holewinski is focused on yet another important aspect — the overall scope and size of government — and, though he has been roughed up a bit in these pages recently, we feel he can be successful if he has learned his lesson about letting attorneys run the government.

So, there is progress, but, sorry to remind us, there is also a tax hike on the table. And big government stalwarts like Linda Conlon and Mike Fugle lurking in the bureaucratic shadows. Lots of work still to do, in other words, and so many miles to go before we can sleep. 

At least the baby is up and walking.