Freepik
A school with a price tag that says '$607 million' next to a house with a price tag indicating an $800 increase per year.
I follow this pretty closely, so I knew it was coming. But I wonder how many Madison homeowners had a rude awakening last week when they opened their property tax bills.
Taxes on the average house here went up by around $800 or 11%. And almost all of that increase is due to the $607 million in new taxes voters approved with an almost 70% “yes” vote on two referendums in November 2024.
The school board rushed those referendums to the presidential ballot because they knew there would be a massive turnout of liberal voters, most of whom did not follow local issues. Liberals showed up en masse to vote for Kamala Harris and against Donald Trump and while there, they noticed there was an opportunity to also show their support for public schools. It was a no-brainer — in so many unfortunate ways.
There was a lot wrong with those referendums, but the flagship of bad policy was the new Shabazz/Sherman building. That's the school building on the north side which houses Sherman Middle School and Malcolm Shabazz High School. Enrollment in both schools has been declining and is projected to continue to go down for the foreseeable future. In fact, Shabazz has only about 114 students, which should raise questions about why the school exists at all.
The logical thing to do would have been to close the schools and redraw the attendance maps. Instead, the school board proposed a new, bigger building. In fact, at $108 million it was the single biggest item in the $507 million capital referendum. And now, after the fact, MMSD is doing an attendance boundary study.
This is madness. But with no organized opposition to the hard-left in Madison, this issue and others like it were hardly raised in the mainstream media. I did write an op-ed in the State Journal and I tried to raise the alarm in this space, but that was pretty much all there was in terms of a dissenting voice.
And now it's time to pay up. And here's a rich irony. Madison officials talk endlessly about affordability while supporting referendums that increase property taxes at three times the rate of inflation, something that will also soon be reflected in rents. The one certain thing local government can really do to keep housing costs down is to restrain property taxes. And we're going vigorously in the other direction.
Finally, there's a question of what we get for our money. Again because there is no loyal opposition, there was no demand for accountability in the spending. The school board promised taxpayers absolutely nothing in terms of improved test scores, less violence and better behavior in the classroom, or a narrowing of the racial achievement gap. They did spend $100,000 on a new MMSD logo, so we got that.
Will this sticker shock finally result in some sort of accountability movement? I wouldn't bet on it. In a government town a lot of voters aren't going to vote against more money for government. And among liberals, public schools are the closest thing to a sacrament. Liberals would sooner forgo kale and MS NOW before they'd vote against a school referendum, no matter how many facts you throw at them. I literally had people tell me that they saw my arguments, agreed with them, but “I just could never vote against a school referendum.” It’s like religion.
So, my guess is we're just going to slog along like this. We'll talk and talk and talk about how much we care about public education while blithely accepting terrible performance in our schools. We'll blather on endlessly about the cost of housing while voting for 11% property tax increases. Madison's famous separation from reality grows wider.
Dave Cieslewicz is a Madison- and Upper Peninsula-based writer who served as mayor of Madison from 2003 to 2011. You can read more of his work at Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos.
