Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 32. Sunrise is 6:41 AM and sunset 5:34 PM for 10h 52m 56s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 2.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1947, in New York City, Edwin Land demonstrates the first “instant camera,” the Polaroid Land Camera, to a meeting of the Optical Society of America.
Can Wisconsin’s popularly-elected governor and the gerrymandered legislature reach an agreement on shared revenue? Rich Kremer reports Local government advocates confident a fix to ‘broken’ shared revenue program will happen this year (‘Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers and GOP leaders in Legislature honing in on directing portion of state sales tax to cities, towns, counties’):
Leaders of Wisconsin’s two largest local government associations say they expect changes are coming for the state’s “broken” shared revenue system, they’re just not sure what that will look like.
Still, they say bipartisan discussions about the need to address the system that funnels state funds to Wisconsin’s counties and municipalities are a big deal because communities around the state, from the smallest towns to the largest cities, are struggling to pay for basic government services.
During his state budget address Jan. 24, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers pledged to send 20 percent of state sales tax revenues back to local governments. Evers’ budget proposal also calls for allowing Milwaukee County to impose an additional 1 percent sales tax, with half of those proceeds going to the City of Milwaukee.
The governor’s call for dedicating a portion of sales tax income toward shared revenue is similar to one discussed by Republican leaders in the Legislature since December. The Legislature’s plan calls for dedicating 1 cent of every 5 cents the state collects in sales tax to local communities.
“The soup hasn’t been cooked, but we at least have agreed on the pot that the soup is going to go in,” Wisconsin Towns Association Executive Director Mike Koles told Wisconsin Eye’s Newsmakers on Monday. “That’s tremendous. We haven’t been there in a long time.”
The pot is the least of it. Best to wait for the full recipe; there is no recipe without ingredients.
Absolutely agree that waiting for the full recipe is necessary.