Budget Passes
We passed the budget early in the morning on July 3rd. This budget delivers great results for Wisconsinites. It lowers taxes and puts families first. Below are some of the highlights. You can read the budget here.
Nearly $1.5 billion in tax reductions
- Lower income taxes for most Wisconsinites. The second lowest tax bracket is expanded to include married couples making up to $67,300 per year and at $50,480 per year for single filers.
- For individuals age 67 and above the first $24,000 for a single filer or the first $48,000 for married couples filing jointly of retirement income is excluded from taxation.
- Eliminates sales tax on residential energy bills.
Forty-two new Assistant District Attorneys across the state
- Brown County is given 7 (this should help with case backlog).
- Outagamie County is given 2.
- Manitowoc County is given 2.
Rising Phoenix Early College High School Program
- Provides funding to UW-Green Bay for high school students to graduate high school with college credit up to an associate’s degree.
Extension of school choice
- A new program was created to extend school choice to four-year-old kindergarten.
Childcare reforms
- Allows 16- and 17-year-olds to provide care under the supervision of an adult teacher.
- For group care child center the child teacher ratio for infants up to 18 months is now 1 to 4 with a maximum group size of 8. For children 18 months to 30 months the ratio is increased from a 1 to 6 ratio to a 1 to 7 ratio. The max group size will increase from 12 children to 14 children. This is a 2-year pilot project.
- $123 million toward the state child care subsidy program for the working poor. This helps families afford childcare and continue working.
- $28.6 million to increase reimbursement rates for facilities serving toddlers and infants.
Planned closure of the Green Bay Correctional Institution
- The budget begins the closure of the Green Bay Correctional Institution.
Support for the Green Bay port cleanup
- The Green Bay port is a regional hub for trade. This budget secures $20 million to continue on the on-going redevelopment project.
Continued funding for the Southern bridge project
I want to address the amendments assembly democrats proposed which were tabled. Some of them weren’t terrible ideas. Some of them were even good ideas. But here’s the thing about a budget, you will never run out of “good” ideas to spend money on. You need to prioritize and be careful not to overextend.
With the investments in Special Education, income tax relief, new Assistant District Attorneys, etc., that leaves a balance of roughly $600 million. But we will likely have other bills that spend money throughout the remainder of this session, such as my bill to fund volunteer firefighters. We can’t spend it all right now.
Furthermore, many of these proposed amendments didn’t even have fiscal notes on them to tell us how much they might cost though a gut estimate on some of them was billions. Passing those would have been reckless. And the ones which did have fiscal notes added up to around $2 billion. Unless we were going to raise taxes to pay for those spending increases, we simply didn’t have the money. ($2 billion is more than the half billion we had left.)
So, thank you to the legislative Democrats who were willing to work with Republicans and the governor to find bipartisan agreement. There weren’t many, but they were appreciated.
The Democrats wanted this budget to include backfill for the property tax increase Governor Evers created with his line-item veto in the last budget. But we simply don’t have the money to cover for his mistake. Watch my exchange with Representative Knodl about the 400 Democrat property tax increase here.
