City approves $14.3M tax levy with budget

The Shawano Common Council signed off on a $14.3 million tax levy on Nov. 18 as it approved its 2021 budget, an increase of $247,000 from 2020.

That levy includes an increase in the city tax rate from $9.38 per $1,000 of assessed valuation to almost $9.57 for 2021. Combined with the levies from the Shawano School District, the TIF districts, Northeast Wisconsin Technical College and Shawano County, property owners with a $100,000 property can expect to pay $36.61 more in 2021 than in 2020, according to City Administrator Eddie Sheppard.

“The city of Shawano is about 38% of the tax bill, and the school district is also 38%,” Sheppard said. “The county is quite a bit smaller at 21% because they levy the entire county.”

The new budget includes a 3% pay hike for unionized public safety employees, while non-unionized employees with the city will be seeing a 2% raise.

The budget also allows for a second school resource officer to be hired with the school district. While the city had previously divided the expenses evenly with the district for the one officer, the new arrangement has the city only paying for 30% of the expenses while the school district picks up the other 70%.

“The city got an entire new position for a cost of about $12,000,” Sheppard said. “We thought that was a good tradeoff and being able to continue working the school district to provide the services there.”

In all, the public safety portion of the budget is going up by $171,438 because of the new school resource officer, police pay raises and $20,000 in other increases for the Shawano Ambulance Service, according to Sheppard.

General government expenses are down for 2021 mainly because it is not a regular election year, Sheppard said, although the city will have a special mayoral election next spring due to Ed Whealon’s pending resignation at the end of November.

The budget also includes about $2 million in grants to go to the long-planned plaza project for downtown Shawano, connecting the area with Franklin Park.

“It’s been the kind of project we’ve been talking about for four or five years now,” Sheppard said. “We were able to find a nice funding source this year with our use-it-or-lose-it Community Development Block grant funds. We were able to parlay that $600,000 and turn it into a $1 million grant from the state through their public facilities program.”

Also included is turning a part-time code enforcement position to a 30-hour-per-week position that includes administrative duties for planning and zoning, Sheppard said.

“There’s a lot there, and staff just felt this was a necessary change to make,” he said.

Replacing garbage trucks is also part of the new budget, with Sheppard noting that now the budget will set aside funding each year to allow public works equipment to be replaced on a regular cycle.

“As soon as we hit year 10 or 11, we really start to see the maintenance issues flare up,” Sheppard said. “We should be nice and set going forward without any major costs or increases.”

A recreation maintenance shop at Memorial Park will be getting some upgrades in the new budget, as Sheppard explained that the old one is no longer meeting the needs of the city park and recreation staff.

Sheppard noted that the difficulty of the year due to the pandemic made it hard to put together next year’s budget.

“You look at your previous year typically to see where you’re going to be your following year,” Sheppard said. “We realized early on in 2020 that this was going to be a useless year in building our budget because we didn’t know how things would hold for the rest of the year.”'

lpulaski@newmedia-wi.com