Milwaukee's 2% sales tax brought $200 million into city coffers in first year
The city had anticipated — and budgeted — revenues from the 2% sales tax at about $184 million. The state had previously put that estimate at $193.6 million.
In all, Milwaukee Comptroller Bill Christianson said the 2024 sales tax revenue was $16.6 million over budget.
The difference between expected and actual revenue can be explained by two factors, he said.
First, the city made a conservative estimate because it didn't have its own historical sales-tax data to draw from. Second, the local economy was strong, driven by major events like the Harley-Davidson Homecoming Festival and the Republican National Convention and the absence of a broader economic slowdown.
The sales tax went into effect Jan. 1, 2024, as part of a local government funding law passed by the state Legislature and signed by Gov. Tony Evers the previous year.
The landmark law, known as Act 12, boosted revenue to local governments, including by allowing Milwaukee to enact a local sales tax and Milwaukee County to boost its existing sales tax.
The law helped the city avoid deep service cuts, but it also came with significantly increased costs for public safety and the city's annual pension payments in addition to a series of non-fiscal policies aimed at the city.
The city may use the sales tax dollars only for specific areas: pension costs; maintaining police, fire protection and emergency medical services at April 1, 2023, levels; and growing police and fire staffing over a decade to levels mandated in the new law.
The city must increase its police and fire personnel until it has at least 1,725 officers, including 175 detectives, and a daily staffing level of at least 218 members in the fire department. It must reach those benchmarks by the end of the 10th year after a sales tax goes into effect.
The city had 1,587 police officers in late 2024.
The increased funding does not mean the city is flush with cash.
Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson warned ahead of 2025 budget deliberations that departments would face difficult decisions.
Alison Dirr can be reached at adirr@jrn.com.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Milwaukee's 2% sales tax brought in $200 million in 2024
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Los Angeles Times
an hour ago
- Los Angeles Times
Texas Republicans aim to redraw House districts at Trump's urging, but there's a risk
AUSTIN, Texas — U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, a Texas Democrat who represents a slice of the Rio Grande Valley along the border with Mexico, won his last congressional election by just over 5,000 votes. That makes him a tempting target for Republicans, who are poised to redraw the state's congressional maps this week and devise five new winnable seats for the GOP that would help the party avoid losing House control in next year's midterm elections. Adjusting the lines of Gonzalez's district to bring in a few thousand more Republican voters, while shifting some Democratic ones out, could flip his seat. Gonzalez said he is not worried. Those Democratic voters will have to end up in one of the Republican districts that flank Gonzalez's current one, making those districts more competitive — possibly enough so it could flip the seats to Democrats. 'Get ready for some pickup opportunities,' Gonzalez said, adding that his party is already recruiting challengers to Republicans whose districts they expect to be destabilized by the process. 'We're talking to some veterans, we're talking to some former law enforcement.' Texas has 38 seats in the House. Republicans now hold 25 and Democrats 12, with one seat vacant after Democratic Rep. Sylvester Turner, a former Houston mayor, died in March. Gonzalez's district — and what happens to the neighboring GOP-held ones — is at the crux of President Trump's high-risk, high-reward push to get Texas Republicans to redraw their political map. Trump is seeking to avoid the traditional midterm letdown that most incumbent presidents endure and hold onto the House, which the GOP narrowly controls. Trump's push comes as there are numerous political danger signs for his presidency, both in the recent turmoil over his administration's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case and in new polling. Surveys from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research show most U.S. adults think that his policies have not helped them and that his tax cut and spending bill will only help the wealthy. The fear of accidentally creating unsafe seats is one reason Texas Republicans drew their lines cautiously in 2021, when the constitutionally mandated redistricting process kicked off in all 50 states. Mapmakers — in most states, it's the party that controls the Legislature — must adjust congressional and state legislative lines after every 10-year census to ensure that districts have about the same number of residents. That is a golden opportunity for one party to rig the map against the other, a tactic known as gerrymandering. But there is a term, too, for so aggressively redrawing a map that it puts that party's own seats at risk: a 'dummymander.' The Texas GOP knows the risk. In the 2010s, the Republican-controlled Legislature drew political lines that helped pad the GOP's House majority. That lasted until 2018, when a backlash against Trump in his first term led Democrats to flip two seats in Texas that Republicans had thought safe. In 2021, with Republicans still comfortably in charge of the Texas Legislature, the party was cautious, opting for a map that mainly shored up their incumbents rather than targeted Democrats. Still, plenty of Republicans believe their Texas counterparts can safely go on offense. 'Smart map-drawing can yield pickup opportunities while not putting our incumbents in jeopardy,' said Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, which helps coordinate mapmaking for the party nationally. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott called a special session of the Legislature, which starts Monday, to comply with Trump's request to redraw the congressional maps and to address the flooding in Texas Hill Country that killed at least 135 people this month. Democratic state lawmakers are talking about staying away from the Capitol to deny the Legislature the minimum number needed to convene. Republican Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton posted that any Democrats who did that should be arrested. Lawmakers can be fined up to $500 a day for breaking a quorum after the House changed its rules when Democrats initiated a walkout in 2021. Despite the new penalties, Democratic state Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, who led the walkout in 2021, left open the possibility of another. 'I don't think anybody should underestimate the will of Texas Democrats,' he said. Texas is not the only Republican state engaged in mid-decade redistricting. After staving off a ballot measure to expand the power of a mapmaking commission last election, Ohio Republicans hope to redraw their congressional map from a 10-5 one favoring the GOP to one as lopsided as 13 to 2, in a state Trump won last year with 55% of the vote. Some Democratic leaders have suggested that states where their party is in control should counter the expected redraw in Texas. 'We have to be absolutely ruthless about getting back in power,' former Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke said Sunday on CNN. But Democrats have fewer options. More of the states their party controls do not allow elected partisans to draw maps and entrust independent commissions to draw fair lines. Among them is California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom has floated the long-shot idea of working around the state's commission. The few Democratic-controlled states that do allow elected officials to draw the lines, such as Illinois, have already seen Democrats max out their advantages. Trump and his allies have been rallying Texas Republicans to ignore whatever fears they may have and to go big. On Tuesday, the president posted on his social media site a reminder of his record in the state in the November election: 'Won by one and a half million Votes, and almost 14%. Also, won all of the Border Counties along Mexico, something which has never happened before. I keep hearing about Texas 'going Blue,' but it is just another Democrat LIE.' Texas has long been eyed as a state trending Democratic because of its growing nonwhite population. But those communities swung right last year and helped Trump expand his margin to nearly 14 percentage points, a significant improvement on his 5½-point win in 2020. Michael Li, a Texas native and longtime watcher of the state at the Brennan Center for Justice in New York, said there's no way to know whether that trend will continue in next year's elections or whether the state will shift back toward Democrats. 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But in doing so, Republicans face a legal risk on top of their electoral one: that they break up districts required by the Voting Rights Act to have a critical amount of certain minority groups. The goal of the federal law is to enable those communities to elect representatives of their choosing. The Texas GOP already is facing a lawsuit from civil rights groups alleging its initial 2021 map did this. If this year's redistricting is too aggressive, it could trigger a second complaint. 'It's politically and legally risky,' Li said of the redistricting strategy. 'It's throwing caution to the winds.' Riccardi and Lathan write for the Associated Press and reported from Denver and Austin, respectively.
The Hill
3 hours ago
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FEMA uncertainty hangs over hurricane season
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Clint Crowe (R) created a study committee on disaster mitigation. Kentucky's state Legislature passed a law creating a task force to prepare for potential changes in FEMA funding. Republican state Sen. Matthew Deneen, who co-sponsored the Kentucky bill, said the panel would make sure the state is prepared for whatever comes. 'Well, I think that any time that we're going to have change coming out of Washington, D.C., on the federal level, you know, we don't know exactly what those numbers are going to be, and so it's very important for us to be agile, to be responsive and to be prepared,' he told The Hill. Trump administration officials and some Republicans on Capitol Hill argue the agency is inefficient and should take a more supportive role, with states taking the lead in disaster response. 'Federal emergency management should be state and locally led rather than how it has operated for decades,' Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem said earlier this month. 'This entire agency needs to be eliminated as it exists today and remade into a responsive agency,' she added. But rhetoric from President Trump's officials shifted toward reforming FEMA, rather than axing it entirely, following the devastating floods in Texas this month. Noem faced criticism over reports of botched disaster response efforts, and the Houston Chronicle editorial board even slammed Noem's leadership, comparing FEMA's response to the Texas floods to the Hurricane Katrina debacle. The Texas floods killed at least 120 people, with more than 100 still missing. A preliminary estimate from AccuWeather projects the disaster to cost between $18 billion and $22 billion. Still, Trump has praised Noem's handling of the floods and brushed off reports that her changes to funding decisions slowed down the federal response in Texas. 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Yahoo
9 hours ago
- Yahoo
Special sessions explained: How they work, what the rules are
AUSTIN (KXAN) — Texas's constitution limits the legislature to just 140 days every other year to pass new laws. However, it also lets the governor call for 'special sessions' between those biennial regular sessions. TxLege data: How many bills have state lawmakers passed? From 1876 until 2025, the state has had more than 100 special sessions, according to the Legislative Reference Library of Texas, or LRL. Governors average slightly over two extra sessions between regular ones. What rules does the Governor have to follow? Texas' special sessions first began during the Civil War, when most of the state's rules about the sessions were not established. The 1876 Texas Constitution created the rules used in our modern special session rules. When the Legislature shall be convened in special session, there shall be no legislation upon subjects other than those designated in the proclamation of the Governor calling such session, or presented to them by the Governor; and no such session shall be of longer duration than thirty days. Texas Constitution of 1876, section 30 Here are the rules placed on the Texas Governor: During a regular session, they can announce there will be a special session; Must issue a proclamation setting a session's start date and its topics; and, Can add topics during a special session. The LRL has answered questions about special sessions that it gets frequently, which provide additional insight into what a governor can and can't do: No limit to how many special sessions can be called; Can't convene a special session until a session adjourns; Can convene on the same day a session adjourns; and, Breaks between sessions are not required. What rules do lawmakers have to follow? Here are the rules placed on the Legislature: Can only meet in special session for 30 days maximum; Can only file legislation related to the topics chosen by the governor; and, Can submit resolutions that aren't related, but joint resolutions must be related. The Texas Senate and its House of Representatives use slight modifications to their rules of procedure during special sessions. These rule changes mostly serve to tighten up time frames to work within the shorter session. For example, House rules require committees to post notice of a public hearing at least five days before said hearing. During a special session, committees are only required to post notice 24 hours beforehand. Bills can be filed 30 days prior to the start of a special session. Topics set tone, tempo of sessions A governor isn't limited in how many topics they can call. In 1918, Gov. William Pettus Hobby called a special session with 172 topics. In 2013, Gov. Rick Perry called a session with just one topic. Fewer topics before the legislature should help focus lawmakers' efforts. That 2013 session ended with the legislature passing an infrastructure bill after seven days. However, it would be inaccurate to say that fewer topics mean a shorter session. A 1989 special session called by Gov. William Clements, Jr. asked lawmakers to only address 'reform of the worker's compensation system.' It lasted 29 days and passed one bill. A politically contentious topic can stir up more debate and pushback from opponents, which eats up the session's limited time. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Solve the daily Crossword
