Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz announces in a News Release his commitment to increase property taxes. I’m surprised the headline doesn’t read Mayor proposes 1.6% budget reduction from the historical trends.
“Overall, Cieslewicz has committed to introducing a budget that limits the property tax levy increase to no more than 4.1%”, significantly lower than the 15-year average levy increase of 5.7%.”But wait, there’s more. The City is projecting another $700,000 of revenue from the latest favorite municipal ploy, the fee increase. Mayor Dave is giving visitors to Capital City an increased opportunity to help us locals pay for police and fire service. The Mayor’s office is telling the City Council these higher fines merely bring Madison in line with the UW and the City of Milwaukee.
Additional funding for the new patrol officers will come from a proposed increase in fines for parking violations. Fines for expired parking meter violations would rise to $20 and street sweeping violations would rise to $30, generating a projected $700,000 in new revenue for patrol officers.Mayor Dave and Joel Rogers are good urban planners and it shows in this little maneuver with the public safety money. Deciding to use probable, but still ‘projected’, revenue from fines allows them to satisfy Police and Fire Department funding desires, but in addition it lets them retain dependable revenue from taxation for their other pet projects. So why do it this way? The answer is these New Urbanists dream about a Car Free downtown.
You have the freedom to leave your car behind. Each participant in the Car-Free Challenge eliminates at least one car trip per week. When you do this, you will be making a healthy lifestyle choice. You'll save money as gas prices skyrocket, and you'll be free of traffic and parking hassles.Financing public safety with money from time and location violations of parked cars creates a big incentive not to possess a car downtown. The Cieslewicz administration’s plan for Madison is to create a High Density population island and use Light Rail to move people around. In an already traffic congested downtown, cars on the street are an obstacle to light rail right of way and low risk parking only encourages people to drive to the planned wonderfulness of the fantasy urban model they are building.
