A report by the Wisconsin Taxpayer’s Alliance shows that spending increased 13.4 percent in Wisconsin’s most populated 232 cities — excluding Madison and Milwaukee — between 2003 and 2007. In Madison, spending was up 30.8 percent over the same five-year period, but Milwaukee’s spending increased just 2.4 percent during that time, according to the nonprofit, nonpartisan group.
The report compared per capita spending for 2007 in the 232 communities, plus Madison and Milwaukee. It found that spending per person averaged $805 in the 232 municipalities, with a median cost of $738 per person. There were large variations among the group, with the resort community of Lake Delton spending $3,806 per person, while Howards Grove spent $239 per person.
Madison spent $992 per person, and Milwaukee spent $1,115.
The alliance also looked at municipal debt statewide and found it increased 15.7 percent in the past five years. While five communities had no debt, eight communities had debts of $3,000 per person or more, including Middleton, Mukwonago, Pleasant Prairie and St. Croix Falls.
For more information, view the full Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance report.
The nonprofit Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with Wisconsin Public Radio, Wisconsin Public Television, other news media and the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by the Center do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Credit should be given, in this format: “By Dee J. Hall, Wisconsin Watch”
- If published online, you must include the links and link to wisconsinwatch.org
- If you share the story on social media, please mention @wisconsinwatch (Twitter, Facebook and Instagram)
- Don’t sell the story — it may not be marketed as an individual product.
- Don’t sell ads against the story. But you can publish it with pre-sold ads.
- Your website must include a prominent way to contact you.
- Additional elements that are packaged with our story must be labeled.
- Users can republish our photos, illustrations, graphics and multimedia elements ONLY with stories with which they originally appeared. You may not separate multimedia elements for standalone use.
- If we send you a request to change or remove Wisconsin Watch content from your site, you must agree to do so immediately.
For questions regarding republishing rules please contact Andy Hall, executive director, at ahall@wisconsinwatch.org
