Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway says if she could require all city employees to live in Madison, she would. “I strongly believe that people who work for the city should live in the city,” said Rhodes-Conway at a Finance Committee meeting on Nov. 22.
Still, under her watch, a financial penalty to discourage city staff from living outside the city limits was quietly eliminated in December. Of the city’s 2,800 full-time employees, about 400 professional and supervisory staffers were subject to a one percent reduction from their longevity pay if they did not reside in Madison; 133 employees were paying the penalty.
Members of the Madison Professional and Supervisory Employee Association (MPSEA) fought unsuccessfully for years to get rid of the residency penalty. Rhodes-Conway says her administration acquiesced this year for two reasons.
“One: Fairness. With a very small portion of our employees subject to this, it seemed to me that this was increasingly untenable. And, two: The rising cost of housing in the city. It is very difficult to ask people to try to find housing in the city which may not be available to them at a price point that is reasonable.”
Former Mayor Paul Soglin and past councils rebuffed requests from the employee association to end the penalty, or incentive, depending on how you look at it. In an interview, Soglin says 60 percent of staff in 2013 lived in the city. That percentage dropped to 47 percent as of 2019, according to the city’s human resources department.
“You don’t want a city of just the rich and the poor,” says Soglin. “There is no group more middle-class than city employees.”
Dan Rolfs, a community development project manager for the city, is on MPSEA’s board and lives in Madison. He tells Isthmus that the penalty just wasn’t enough to keep employees from living outside of Madison. He also says some of his members pushed for the residency penalty to be eliminated because they had concerns about sending their kids to public schools in Madison.
“Put yourself in their shoes. You can live outside the city and find a less expensive house. And the school districts — like Verona, DeForest, Sun Prairie — have brand new high schools with excellent tech and science labs, top-notch athletic facilities,” says Rolfs.
At one time, all city employees were required to live in Madison. But beginning in the 1980s, the requirement was eliminated for Madison Metro drivers and eventually stripped from contracts for city employees represented by unions. Until 2013, professional and supervisory staff were required to at least live in Dane County. But that went away when Gov. Scott Walker eliminated residency requirements for public workers. As of Jan. 1, only elected officials, mayoral deputies, and city division heads are required to live in Madison. City Attorney Michael Haas says the city is able to maintain this requirement because division heads have negotiated five-year contracts.
Rhodes-Conway says she remains open to “exploring future policy options” for incentivizing employees to live in the city. “I think it’s really important our employees live in the city that they serve.
