Grand Chute not first with spending referendum

The following is an email Town Supervisors were forwarded from Weston Village Finance Director John Jacobs this morning in response to the Post-Crescent article "Grand Chute could be first in state to bust spending cap ". While the article does an excellent job outlining difficulties growing communities face with state imposed tax levy limits, it appears Grand Chute is not, in fact, the first Wisconsin community to bring spending limits to referendum.

I am just responding to this article because there have been some communities that have exercised using a referendum since the 2005 original spending cap limits were ordered by the State. The Town of Grand Chute is NOT the first community in the State of Wisconsin to exercise a referendum for exceeding the State spending limits.

The Village of Weston held a November 2006 referendum to add a 3rd EMS/Fire Crew to the Weston Fire Department in budget year 2007. The referendum was approved by the voters by a 55/45 vote. Therefore, we added $226,636 over the spending cap limit for budget year 2007, in order to add the additional service to our Budget. By adding the 3rd EMS/Fire Crew in 2007, we now have 24/7 coverage for full-time EMS/Fire service. Before the referendum, we had only 2 full-time shifts providing 80 hours/week full-time service and the remaining 88 hours were covered by paid-on-call employees. The reason for the passing of the referendum was to significantly improve response time to taxpayers/residents so that all parts of the Village of Weston were covered under a 6-minute response time, 24 hours a day/7 days a week. The addition of the 3rd EMS crew has proved successful to meet that improved response time goal (which had sometimes been over 12-minutes, with solely using paid-on-call members during those other 88 hours a week before the referendum).

I just thought that Ed Lowe's story should be clarified, in that he did not check with the Department of Revenue to see how many communities have used the "referendum" during 2006 or 2007 to exceed the spending limits under the original 2005 law. All 1,900+ communities in Wisconsin are required to fill-out a spending limit/exception form in December each year to indicate and substantiate the dollar amount of their tax levy, and if it exceeds the State's spending limit for that individual community. I know that the Village of Weston is NOT the only community in Wisconsin who has ALREADY exercised the referendum option. Therefore, the Town of Grand Chute (by Fox River Mall) is not the first community in the State to use a referendum. I thought somebody should know that Ed Lowe's story appears to be extremely misleading, and was NOT fully researched to get all of the facts correct.

John Jacobs

Village of Weston, WI (Marathon County)

Finance Director/Treasurer