Liam Beran
Robin Vos speaks at a fireside chat at the Wisconsin School of Business on February 12, 2025.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester: 'So what do they want? Us to move state government out of Madison?'
The state of Wisconsin consistently pays Madison — and all other Wisconsin municipalities — much less than it owes for municipal services. The city of Madison received $13 million less than what it was owed in 2024.
Madison officials would like to see full funding for the program, but at least one powerful Republican in the state Legislature could prove a significant obstacle. When asked about Madison officials' desire for the state to fully fund the program, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, instead floated another idea.
“So what do they want? Us to move state government out of Madison?” Vos said after a fireside chat Wednesday evening at UW-Madison. “We could take and move that all out, because I betcha there's municipalities all around the state who would love to fill up their empty downtowns for the same payment we're giving the city.”
When asked if moving state facilities out of Madison is a serious proposal, Vos said “I’m just saying, let’s wait and see. What are they willing to offer in exchange for [municipal service funding]?”
Michael McKittrick, legislative aide to Republican Rep. Scott Allen, confirms the Waukesha representative plans to reintroduce a bill to fully fund the state municipal services payments program and is looking to “gather support.” In a 2023 press release announcing the motion, Allen said Waukesha Mayor Shawn Reilly brought the issue to his attention; Waukesha is shorted nearly $270,000 annually under the program.
Many Wisconsin municipalities are in “financial straits,” Reilly says in an interview, adding that the state should fully pay its obligation under the law. And any reluctance to give Madison more funding over the city’s deep-blue politics hurts other communities in the state, he adds.
“If you're going to say, ‘Madison shouldn't get money, so we're not going to give it to the other communities because we don't like Madison's politics,’ you're not doing your job,” Reilly says. “You should be colorblind, in regards to politics, for paying for police and fire services for your facilities. Which is the way the law was written to begin with. So it actually pisses me off, to be honest.”
Vos says he hadn’t heard of the proposal prior to Wednesday night and that he has not heard complaints from municipal leaders about the program. He adds it’s “unlikely” full funding for the program goes through this session.
Vos says to continue operations as they are would cost $2.3 billion and total new revenue is at $1.8 billion: “We have a $500 million structural deficit before we spend a nickel on anything. The idea that we're going to give $100 million [over two years] ongoing — that number is probably unlikely, but we’ll have to wait and see what the final outcome is.”
Lawmakers underfunded the program, which reimburses municipalities for police, fire and waste management services they provide to state facilities in the 2023-25 session, covering only 38.2% of the costs. Madison received $13 million less than it was owed; across all Wisconsin municipalities, $30.5 million owed under the program was kept in state coffers.
Allen’s bill would likely be one of the measures the city will push this session in an attempt to increase state aid. The city is also looking to hire some additional firepower. A resolution to approve a $72,000 retainer with one of Wisconsin’s top lobbying firms, The Welch Group, was introduced Tuesday night. The mayor’s chief of staff, Sam Munger, expects good things from the firm, but says it may take time to see results.
“We’re talking about a little bit of a long-game here. We don’t expect to get everything we want this session,” he says. “For some of our key priorities, I think it’s going to be a multi-session effort.”
Though voters approved a $22 million referendum in November to plug the city’s 2025 operating budget hole, Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway has warned that without legislative change, future budget shortfalls are inevitable. The Welch Group is based in Madison and has such clients as the Green Bay Packers and General Motors. Munger says city officials were drawn to the firm for its bipartisan legislative connections and absence of clients with direct conflicts.
The city anticipates a need to build bipartisan coalitions, Munger says, and the experience of the Welch Group’s lobbyists, including former Republican Assembly Speaker Jim Steineke, is an asset: “The fact that the fairly recent majority leader of the state [Assembly] is one of their senior partners was not insignificant to our decision.”
The decision comes after city officials faced sharp criticism during the push for a referendum from former Madison Mayor Paul Soglin, who argued that city officials did not lobby state legislators strongly enough. Vos says he’s never met Rhodes-Conway, nor has she ever requested a meeting, though he had met with the city’s former lobbyist, Nick Zavos, multiple times. He says he met “maybe a dozen times” with Soglin during his tenure as mayor.
City communications manager Dylan Brogan says it’s true Rhodes-Conway has never met with Vos, but adds “Remember, [for] a good spell of the mayor’s tenure Vos’ special appointed investigator — [Michael] Gableman — was threatening to arrest her.” Gableman’s investigation into the 2020 election cost Wisconsin taxpayers more than $2 million and found no evidence of widespread fraud.
“How’d that work out?” Brogan says.
To pay for the new lobbying firm, the city cut its $57,324 membership with the League of Wisconsin Municipalities, a nonprofit membership group advocating on behalf of Wisconsin’s towns, villages and cities. Ald. Mike Verveer, a member of the city finance committee, says he is “not a great fan” of the move.
He says the cut, proposed by Rhodes-Conway in her 2024 and 2025 budgets, came from “grave disappointment” about how the League represented Madison’s interests in the 2023-25 budget process, which resulted in a sweeping state aid deal that particularly benefited Milwaukee.
“Madison was singled out for receiving relatively miniscule shared revenue compared to the rest of the state,” Verveer says. The decision to drop League membership makes Madison the only city or village in Wisconsin that’s not a member.
Verveer also has some concerns about the Welch Group and notes he’d like to “explore” the firm’s conflict of interest policy. Verveer says the firm, in representing other clients, has been very effective “in going against some of the city’s interests over the years,” helping push legislation that eliminated tenant rights at the local level and prevented Wisconsin municipalities from developing gun safety ordinances.
“I did share with [Rhodes-Conway] that obviously there will be conflicts between our interests and their many other clients’ interests, and I plan to explore their conflict of interest policy a bit when the issue comes before the city finance committee next Monday,” Verveer says. Verveer would also like to see representatives from the firm report to the city council on a regular basis, a measure he says would help inform the public of the progress the firm makes on behalf of the city.
Still, Verveer says, “It was a given that if we want to have effective use of taxpayers money in terms of our interests being represented in the state Legislature, that we [would go] with a firm like Welch.”
The Welch Group’s price tag, Munger says, is “pretty competitive." The contract, set to start in March, is prorated to $60,000 this year. Part of the cost, $45,000, is partially allocated in the 2025 operating budget, with the remaining $15,000 coming from the mayor’s office budget. Future funding for the contract will need to be provided in operating budgets, according to the proposed resolution.
After Wisconsin’s state legislative maps were redistricted, Democrats picked up 10 seats in the Assembly and four Senate seats in November. Though Republicans maintain majorities in both chambers, the slimmer margins — and the Senate’s new inability to override Gov. Tony Evers’ veto — could assist Madison leaders in pushing for bipartisan progress on municipal finance.
Munger expects the “real talks” will begin in May, after the Republican-led Joint Finance Committee erases Evers’ budget and creates its own proposal.
On the city’s wish list: municipal finance reforms, most notably increasing levy limits and municipal services payments, and payments for transportation, public transit and affordable housing. Though Munger says he’s not expecting progress on the level of 2023’s shared revenue deal for Milwaukee, a renewed lobbying push could create “some foundation for movement in a future session.”
Munger says city officials are aware of and support Allen’s legislation on municipal service payments, noting that any municipalities with a state facility, University of Wisconsin or Wisconsin Technical College System campus, would feel the impacts.
“That is certainly one of the issues, where we think there’s a potential for bipartisan legislation to move that would really make a difference for local governments,” Munger says.
Vos says he’s waiting to hear exactly what Madison is hoping for in terms of state aid. And he would like to see some concessions, though he didn’t specify what those would be.
“Right now, they've only offered, ‘Give us more, so we could do exactly what we've always done.’ Well, that’s not gonna happen,” says Vos. “I'm open to what they have to say, but I haven't heard anything.”
