On page 7B of this edition of your favorite weekly newspaper is The Journal’s annual comparison of property tax mil rates in Grant, Lafayette and Iowa counties.
(The list should have been out in our last January issue, before the Jan. 31 deadline to pay. Somehow despite having created the list for 12 years the editor forgot to create the list until after the deadline. He blames the drugs he was on during his unscheduled absence.)
The math says that mil rates decreased 5 to 6 percent in those three counties on average. But does that mean your property tax bill dropped? To quote former ESPN football guru Lee Corso: Not so fast, my friend!
As homeowners in Platteville can attest, decreasing mil rates are usually the result of increases in property assessments. Before the Platteville School District’s last referendum in 2024 I figured that the total mil rate divided into the average jump in property value in the City of Platteville resulted in an average of 7 percent higher property tax bills. Some homeowners got much larger property tax increases than that. Some owners of commercial property got much larger property tax increase than that later.
Wisconsin has the reputation as a tax hell. The Wisconsin Policy Forum reported that Wisconsin has the 34th highest state and local taxes in the nation, taking 9.77 percent of Wisconsinites’ income. But property taxes are much higher than average — at 1.25 percent of property value in Wisconsin, 1.44 percent in Grant County, 1.557 percent in Iowa County and 1.636 percent in Lafayette County they are higher than the 0.89 percent national average, according to SmartAsset.
Property taxes have been the biggest sore spot among taxpayers since probably property taxes started to be collected, around 1850. (Taxes paid in one big chunk instead of two weeks at a time, as with income taxes, or at every purchase with sales taxes, tend to get the taxpayer’s attention.) The state income tax was created, and the state sales tax was created, expanded and increased, in large part to provide property tax relief. If your property taxes are more than 50 percent beyond the national average the state approach may not be working. Maybe that explains the latest Marquette University Law School poll results you can find elsewhere on this page.
You have read complaints from school (see page 1), county and municipal officials as well as advocates of certain government services that the state does not give them enough money. A lawsuit was announced last week by school districts that believe state education funding (or in their opinion lack thereof) violates the state Constitution. The state Legislature enacted school revenue caps and county and municipal levy limits, which means a future Legislature can get rid of limits on property taxes. The only way to enact permanent (as possible in politics) tax limits is to enact a “taxpayer bill of rights” in the state Constitution, which the Legislature has not done since it has been controlled by the party that allegedly wants to control spending and taxes.
The state that got everyone’s attention about property taxes was California, whose 1978 voters approved Proposition 13, which caps a property’s taxes at 1 percent of its pre-referendum value, limits annual tax increases to 2 percent, and reassesses property only when it’s sold or when a new building is built. California’s property taxes total 0.71 percent of property value, but of course the average California house goes for nearly 2½ times the average Wisconsin house.
This has a relationship to three developments being pushed that generate vocal local opposition — wind farms, solar farms and data centers. Grant County and the townships where wind farms and solar arrays are located are getting payments for each. You would think that town and county elected officials would tell people their property taxes are lower because of those additions to the landscape. I have heard next to nothing about that. Perhaps the official answer would be the payments are covering for inflation, as if higher prices affect only units of government and not those funding government with taxes.
One reason this came up is that I got an email from a PR firm one week ago claiming that “Wisconsinites Back a Billionaires Tax as Their Most Desired New Duty for 2026, Study Finds,” without any indication of how many or what percentage of Wisconsinites that is. Do you know how many billionaires Wisconsin has? BizTimes.com and Forbes.com names all seven for you: Diane Hendricks of ABC Supply, John Menard Jr. of the hardware store, Judy Faulkner of Epic Systems, H. Fisk, Helen and S. Curtis Johnson of the household products family, and James Cargill of the agribusiness. That’s $72 billion of net worth. State government will spend $111 billion this two-year budget cycle. Take all the billionaires’ wealth (as if you could instead of their exiting the state and taking their money with them), and the state will be broke within 16 months. Tax increases ultimately hit not their intended targets, but the middle class.
