This land is my land

As Madison’s population continues to swell, two Dane County towns look to strengthen their borders

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Madison is growing up and out: High-rises now line the isthmus and single-family homes are sprouting on the city’s periphery. Infill in between is intensifying density in long-established neighborhoods.

As Madison’s population continues to increase, so does the pressure to grow geographically. But land is scarce; as Mark Twain observed, “they’re not making it anymore.”

This helps explain why the town of Westport and the town of Middleton have launched the legal and political process to incorporate as the village of Westport and the village of West Middleton. If they succeed, nearby cities and villages would no longer be able to expand into those areas. 

“The town of Westport is pursuing incorporation as a village to ensure its ability to control and determine its own land use, plan for its future, and…preserve the landscape, rural character, and rich community its residents have built,” town Administrator/Clerk-Treasurer Dean Grosskopf says.

“We love where we live,” says Middleton Town Board Chair Cynthia Richson. “At the end of the day, it’s about protecting our town tax base and our geographic boundaries.”

Protect them from what? Extinction would not be an exaggeration.

Look no farther than the town of Burke, town of Blooming Grove, and town of Madison — but look quickly, because they are going…going…gone. Oh, the land and the buildings and the residents remain. But as adjacent communities expanded into their territory, the towns saw no sustainable way forward and agreed to be dissolved as political entities. The town of Madison disappeared from the Dane County map in 2022; Blooming Grove will follow in 2027, and Burke in 2036.

Westport and West Middleton don’t want to be next.

Are we there yet?

If you’re in Madison right now trying to visualize where these would-be villages would be, here are some orienting tips.

Town of Westport: You can see Westport without leaving central Madison. Looking across Lake Mendota from the Memorial Union Terrace, much of the greenery on the opposite shore — including wetlands, farmland and Governor Nelson State Park — is in Westport. Portions of the exclusive Bishops Bay subdivision are located there, along with more modest semi-rural and pseudo-suburban houses, apartments and condominiums. You can get there from Madison by going west (out University Avenue and then north through Middleton) or north (following Northport Drive past Warner Park). On a map, Westport looks like an askew bow tie, with Waunakee collaring the left triangle and Madison tugging at the right.

About 4,400 people live in Westport, according to 2025 estimates. If you remember where the Mariner’s Inn, a popular waterfront restaurant, used to be before it closed last August, then you know where Westport is.

Town of Middleton: Heading west out of Madison along Mineral Point Road, University Avenue, or other major east-west arteries, the territory that may become West Middleton includes the headwaters of Black Earth Creek not far from where University Avenue becomes Highway 14. The rolling hills in the town’s subdivisions and conservancy areas are regarded as the eastern edge of Wisconsin’s Driftless Area. Almost all of the housing consists of single-family homes built on large lots; there are a few duplexes and no apartments. The estimated population is about 7,100.

The town includes more than 30 disconnected fragments (such as a small commercial area visible from the West Beltline that includes a Tesla showroom, a piano store and several other businesses) that were left behind as “town islands” when surrounding properties were added piecemeal to the cities of Madison or Middleton.

Urban terminology

The words town, village and city may not mean what you assume they do. In this story, since Dane County has both a “town of” Middleton and a “city of” Middleton, we will sometimes refer to the town by its proposed village name of “West Middleton.” But city, village and town are not the tall, grande and venti of municipalities.

In casual conversation, a city can be a “college town”; a town can have a “village idiot.” New York, New York, the nation’s largest city, is famously a “helluva town.” But in the language of lawmakers and land use planners, city, village and town are three different ways of organizing a local government in Wisconsin.

Every county in the state is carved into a grid of towns — a vestige of post-colonial times when the United States was organizing the Northwest Territories. When Wisconsin became a state, township boundaries determined who would maintain the roads in sparsely populated rural areas. Not much else in the way of government was needed or wanted.

Inside the towns’ boundaries, cities and villages formed. They typically coalesced around a transportation asset like a roadway, waterway or train station, and grew into cohesive communities with residential neighborhoods, business districts, employment centers, and public facilities like schools, libraries and post offices. As cities and villages, they were politically distinct and independent from the towns surrounding them.

If you are a Madison resident blissfully unaware of anything west of West Towne, why should you care whether any town — east, west or elsewhere — wants to become a village?

The answer is financial, since all communities operate under our state’s nearly exclusive reliance on property taxes for local revenue.

“It comes down to money,” says Tim Hanna, a former mayor of Appleton who now works to promote cooperation among Wisconsin cities, villages and towns as leader of the nonprofit Local Government Institute. “The way local government is funded here, with its heavy reliance on the property tax, is one of the core issues,” Hanna says.

Up or out

Money may not be top-of-mind when local governments tussle over territory and the debate is dominated by issues like land conservation, housing policy and local control. But looming over everything is a matter of dollars that, to some, makes no sense.

Under state law, property taxes — the main source of revenue communities are allowed to tap for providing public services — may increase no faster than the rate by which new construction has added to the value of local real estate in the past year.

In other words: no property growth, no budget growth.

The difficulty of growing their tax bases from within through “infill” or “upfill” development can prompt cities and villages to look longingly beyond their boundaries, into the undeveloped rural “greenfields” of the town next door.

Towns tend to be where the largest amounts of land can be found for projects with the sprawling footprint of a housing subdivision, a distribution warehouse or a data center — land uses that can be fraught with controversy, but which provide a property-value bonanza that adds to the local tax base.

But towns typically do not have the kind of water, sewer, and other public utility infrastructure that these projects require. (Westport happens to be a rare exception.) That is why developers ask that building sites be “annexed” to the nearest community that can efficiently extend those services.

The annexing community gets a fiscal two-fer: revenue from taxes on the newly developed property; and budget breathing room under the state formula that ties tax increases to property value growth.

Towns cannot simply add land from somewhere else to replace what they lose through annexation. Unlike cities and villages, towns cannot annex anything. They can only be annexed.

Annexations have shrunk the town of Middleton’s land area from about 23,000 acres to 9,400. “A shrinking tax base means eventually going the way of the town of Madison, which disappeared and got absorbed into Madison and Fitchburg,” says Richson. “We don’t want that to happen.”

A proposed QTS data center in Dane County is an example of why annexations and incorporations matter.

The reason that the village of DeForest is able to consider annexing a site for the QTS project is that the land is in the town of Vienna. If Vienna were a village or a city, no portion of it could be annexed — by DeForest, or anyone else, for any purpose — and it would be up to Vienna whether the data center is built. But as a town, Vienna lacks that leverage.

Incorporation does not, in and of itself, decide land use issues; it only decides who decides. A future shift in the prevailing political winds could tilt policy one way or another in any given city, village or town.

Character study

Across Pioneer Road from the town of Middleton’s town hall, a real estate sign promises “Country living in the city of Madison.” Single-family homes under construction in the Fox Bluff subdivision offer “your perfect suburban retreat…quick and easy access to the city, yet all the joys of country living in one of Madison’s most sought-after locations.”

If “country living in the city” sounds oxymoronic, actual “country living” already exists in towns — and their residents hope to keep it that way. In surveys conducted for their most recent land use plan updates, Westport respondents were virtually unanimous in saying they would like to “preserve the [town’s] rural character,” and more than two-thirds in the town of Middleton favored “rural roads with shoulders and ditches rather than urban streets with curbs and sidewalks.”

Neither Westport nor West Middleton has anything resembling a downtown, or any desire to create one.

Shopping and entertainment ranked last among the reasons people chose to live in Westport, and barely a third of those responding supported “a more distinctive Town Center.” In West Middleton, most residents “commute to adjacent communities for work, shopping, entertainment, and dining,” according to a 2019 analysis. Two-thirds of respondents said the town does not need “more commercial activity.”

But West Middleton and Westport are not posing for a Norman Rockwell painting of an idyllic tree-lined main street or grassy village green; they are applying for a designation under state law. And the law says that a proposed city or village — if it is near enough to an existing metropolitan area — does not need a downtown of its own.

Courting approval

Westport and West Middleton have begun the process of requesting village status by filing the required paperwork in Dane County Circuit Court. If the court finds everything in order, the cases advance to a review board in the state Department of Administration for a deeper dive into the merits of each application.

Since 2000, the review board has considered 33 petitions for towns to become villages. Fifteen were approved, all but one of which were then ratified by local voters.

Of the petitions that were denied, “Common reasons…include lack of a community identity and negative effects on neighboring communities,” according to an analysis by the Wisconsin Legislative Council.

This is why Westport and West Middleton, while their applications are pending, are also negotiating with their municipal neighbors to address concerns before they become objections. Madison officials have been part of these discussions.

“The city of Madison has a consistent position on nearby towns seeking incorporation,” Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway says in a statement to Isthmus. “We want to ensure sensible boundaries and that development in the region develops in a smart and climate-friendly way.”

Deputy Mayor Christie Baumel says neither incorporation, as proposed, presents a threat to Madison or its development options.

“The city has a long-standing agreement and cooperative relationship with the town of Middleton that will remain in place should the town incorporate. That agreement…has resulted in sensible and controlled growth in the area over the last 22 years, and we expect it will continue to do so for the next 35 years.

“For Westport,” Baumel adds, “the Yahara River and the Cherokee Marsh have long set the limits of the city’s expansion in that area. The city has no plans to extend utilities across the River and Marsh, and has no plans to grow in that direction.”

Westport’s petition won initial court approval in December 2024, but the town has chosen to hold off on submitting it to the state board while negotiations continue with Madison as well as Waunakee, Middleton and DeForest, each of which also borders the town.

“Once the boundary agreements are finalized as much as we are able to do so, we will then file with the Review Board,” Grosskopf says. “At this point we are still in that process.”

Fair to Middleton?

Meanwhile, the two Middletons are at odds. Negotiations have failed to resolve issues arising from irregular boundaries and town islands.

“The city would lay out parcels they would like to annex, and it was not really in the best interest of the town,” Richson says. One example is near Middleton’s Municipal Airport, whose flights in and out of the city pass through town air space. “Up on the hill behind the Lexus dealer is Highwood Circle Estates, which is a lovely town of Middleton subdivision. We would not like to give that up.”

Middleton City Attorney Matthew Fleming objected to the town’s petition during an October 2025 circuit court hearing, arguing that the proposed new village is not “homogenous and compact” as the law requires, but “appears to be the very definition of an area that is scattered, fragmented or haphazard.”

Town islands were not the town’s idea; they are the remnants of neighboring cities annexing this-but-not-that over the years. If the town is only able to make a village out of the “homogenous and compact” part, the remaining islands lack the tax base to survive as a viable town — much as the fragmented town of Madison discovered before its scheduled demise.

“I think whatever differences we have are eminently resolvable,” Fleming told Isthmus after the hearing. “It’s quite possible that there is an incorporation that the city could support, or at least not oppose.” Further court proceedings scheduled in January may decide whether the West Middleton application advances to the state board.

Community over boundaries

If it seems audacious that an archipelago of town islands or a bow-tie of land triangles wants to declare itself a village, maybe that’s because the imperfect tools they have to defend themselves under state law fit the circumstances about as well as a one-size trucker cap.

Tim Hanna counsels local governing bodies to focus less on the boundaries that separate them and more on the common interests that connect them, because their constituents don’t particularly care — or sometimes even realize — whether they are in the city of this or the town of that.

“You live your life not based on political jurisdictions, but based on relationships, a local economy that you all support, and a feeling of community,” Hanna says. “We need to figure out a way to govern that better reflects the way our citizens live their lives. We’re in this together.”