Will we bow to the GOP, or fight for our community?

The referendum will test our values and shape our future, for good or for ill.

“We will have to think long and hard as a community about what we want to give up, to either bow to their will, or other ways we want to fight,” Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway told me during a recent interview. She was talking about the choice Madisonians face as they vote on a referendum that would increase property taxes in order to stave off painful City budget cuts. And by “their will,” Rhodes-Conway meant Republican state legislators’ relentless campaign to deny Madison its fair share of state funds.

The City of Madison is facing a $22 million budget shortfall. This is a test of compassion, community, and foresight for its residents. Not only is Madison, Wisconsin’s fastest-growing city, and one of the state’s main economic drivers, but Dane County, along with Milwaukee, are the Democratic (and democracy) anchors of the state. Voters in Dane County give Democrats a crucial edge in statewide elections. That edge grows as the Madison area’s population grows. The Wisconsin state legislature is competitive again, because Dane County voters turned out in high numbers for state Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz, creating a liberal majority on the court that threw out Republicans’ gerrymandered legislative maps in late 2023.

The City of Madison and its surrounding municipalities are the electoral safeguards, keeping fascist forces at bay. That gives this referendum a significance that goes beyond property taxes and the specifics of cutbacks to City services. Madisonians are really being asked to cast a near-existential vote about the role they want to play in state politics. Fascism creates social alienation; it pushes us to abandon community care and indulge in extreme individuality. It makes us believe there is no other choice. To vote “no” is to surrender to that mentality.

The tough choices in front of us are by intentional design. Rhodes-Conway underscores this when talking about the purpose of Act 10: “They wanted to starve school districts, wanted to starve local government and force us into an austerity mindset, and force us to fight over resources, and cut services, and abandon our communities.”

Fighting over resources is precisely what is happening. A vocal opposition movement in Madison wants to defeat the referendum, citing a multitude of reasons. Some simply admit that they don’t want to pay more in taxes. On the more disingenuous end, they claim that higher property taxes will be inequitable towards those with the least. Plenty on the “no” side are using this opportunity as a political club against a mayor they don’t like, and claiming that the City has failed to lobby the state or to take pre-emptive action, as if that would make a difference.

The arguments against Madison’s referendum are short-sighted and individualistic. They feed into what the Wisconsin GOP hopes will happen to Madison: a downward spiral of austerity. That would mean years of increasing budget cuts, decreasing services, and likely a population outflow from Madison and Dane County. We will lose any power we have, economically and politically.

Despite opponents’ claims, the state GOP has no will or want to work with the City of Madison. As the mayor puts it, comparing Madison’s property-tax referendum to Milwaukee’s recent sales tax increase when it comes to lobbying efforts is “comparing apples to oranges.” To even get the small win of being able to hold a sales-tax referendum, Milwaukee had to make significant, Milwaukee-specific concessions to Republicans in the legislature in 2023. The bad deal Milwaukee got in exchange for more shared revenue funding is still not enough to save the city’s finances in the long run. The resulting bill, overhauling the state’s shared-revenue policies, even included concessions that all municipalities had to accept. Anyone who believes that fixing this is as simple as lobbying the legislature’s GOP majority has no grasp on the socio-political climate of this state and nation. Why would Republicans offer local governments a better deal, when they have us where they want us, at each other’s necks?

Believing that voting “no” is the best course of action is a myopic view at best. Austerity breaks communities and cities. It also quite literally kills. A 2022 case study in Great Britain, where the public has faced years of cuts to benefits and services, attributed over 300,000 deaths to austerity policies. These early deaths disproportionately hit those with the least in Great Britain, and we are all aware of the ongoing racial disparities in Madison and Dane County. However, the City of Madison has recently made progress in some areas. For example, the Saving Our Babies initiative, an initiative between the City, Dane County, non-profits, and other public entities, has made gains in closing the metropolitan area’s Black Maternal Mortality Gap. While there is progress, there is so much more work to do.

Austerity makes serving the city and addressing its needs that much harder. There’s not a switch you can flip to turn it around, either. “One of the impacts you see right away is the loss of staff and institutional knowledge,” Rhodes-Conway told me. “It’s very hard, if not impossible, to replace. If you have cut, and cut, and cut, and lost staff, and lost capacity, it’s not like you can just say, ‘We’re going to hire a bunch of people.’ You can hire people; they have to be trained, know the community and the job, before they can be effective in their work.” The turnaround from austerity to restored budgets and services takes time. It takes years.

And time is something we in Wisconsin and the United States don’t have. We can’t wait for the best conditions to appear to lobby for more state or federal funds. We can only take action with the tools in front of us to avoid the worst possibilities. This is a fight for the soul of our community, in a world facing existential dangers in climate change, renewed territorial imperialism, ethno-nationalism, and multiple genocides. This dangerous mix of behaviors and ideologies permeates every major and minor global or regional power—the USA, Israel, and the wider West are not the only imperial or would-be imperial powers. We have so much we can’t control; austerity takes even more control from our small, local hands.

Everyone in Madison will feel the cuts if the referendum doesn’t pass. Still, those who rely upon City services the most—libraries, public transportation, and youth programming, to name a few—will face a disproportionate impact.

The City is already experiencing the impacts of austerity. With fewer staff per capita able to inspect buildings and construction sites, there is a bottleneck in development. The mayor would like more staff to help facilitate development, especially housing development. The City will still be dealing with budget constraints even if the referendum passes. We’ll still have debates over hard choices and cuts, even if the referendum passes, because it isn’t a spending problem but a revenue problem. There are contentious debates like the current uproar over a budget proposal in which Rhodes-Conway targets funding for civilian police oversight, pitting it against funding for the Madison Public Library’s planned Imagination Center. I believe there are better ways to balance the budget.

While it isn’t the perfect choice, passing the tax levy is the least regressive option. The City has already been keeping its operational budgets down in recent years. In fact, when adjusted for inflation, the proposed 2025 Operations budget, Option 1, for if the referendum passes, is still smaller than the mayor’s first-term budget. But if it doesn’t pass, on top of department and services cuts, there will be more service charges, and tax increases that will impact those with the least the most. I agree that there are real concerns about property tax increases, specifically their impact on lower-income homeowners and renters. Yet, there is a path forward. While the City can offer some solutions, the community itself can offer just as many. It’s curious that some of the loudest vote-no voices, like the twin Pauls in Soglin and Fanlund, present only a narrow view, limiting their arguments to what local government can do to address housing or to mythic beliefs in the power of lobbying. And Soglin appears to hold a grudge against the Mayor for unseating him, with no shortage of mud to sling against anything and everything she does. Additionally, for all of Soglin’s self-righteous table-pounding about lobbying, he wasn’t successful in his own administration’s lobbying efforts to raise shared revenue. 

The solutions that are in the City’s hands, we must support. We need to make it easier to build more housing, fully embrace the most recent zoning changes, and build for density in the least dense parts of the city. These proposed changes, and even building market-rate housing, can reduce housing prices. 

We just have to look to our northern neighbors in Minneapolis. They made even more radical zoning changes and have seen their rents flatten out. Two other cities that struggled with growth and high housing prices—Austin and Seattle —have started to build themselves out of the hole, driving down housing prices. 

While we should and must enable the City of Madison to pursue these routes, there are other solutions people in the community can drive. I have yet to see those who claim they are scared about the referendum’s impact on renters and homeowners put forward any real ideas along these lines. I asked Mayor Rhodes-Conway if there are any community-based solutions to housing, such as co-ops or land trusts, and what people can do to help. There are three leading community-based solutions she mentioned, that our most well-off can help support.

The first is the Madison Area Community Land Trust, which acquires land where affordable homes are built. As MACLT’s website puts it, “homeowner(s) agrees to pay it forward to the next buyer by selling the house at an affordable price based on a resale formula.” For those with the most, they can work with partner lenders to help fund the land trust.

Another solution is to partner with the city’s Housing Forward Fund, which is partnered with the Urban League of Greater Madison (ULGM) and the Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority (WHEDA), which is helping build affordable housing, and helping those who are housing insecure already.

The third is in co-ops, with the Madison Area Cooperative Housing Alliance (MACHA), which anyone can directly donate to. Housing cooperatives have been around for a long time and are not a new solution, but they are still a piece of the solution. According to MACHA, “A housing cooperative is a residence that is collectively owned and controlled by its members (usually the people who live there).”

The mayor called these solutions a form of mutual aid, and I agree. Mutual aid is what the current crisis boils down to: Is Madison, as a community, willing to work with and support one another? Or, is it going to fall into the trap the GOP-controlled legislature has been setting for it, as some seem to be doing?

I believe we can come together not just to vote for the referendum but to work together to minimize its potential negative impacts as we continue to fight for change in state government. Rhodes-Conway summarizes the choice in front of us well: “Here in Madison, we’ve done a good job for more than a decade staying true to our values and investing in the future of our community and schools,” she says. “That is again the choice before us; we can choose a path of austerity and make cuts year after year until something changes. Or we can invest a modest amount in our future while we fight for our state; I think Madison is worth it and that it is a community that doesn’t want to go down the path of austerity and instead invests in a future bright for all of us.”

If we come together to vote to keep the city growing, we must also support those facing housing insecurity. If those with the most are willing to invest, and if all of us are willing to embrace zoning and density, these impacts will be minimal. The type of city we want is in our hands, even if the state legislature isn’t. 

Embracing community is how we move through the perils of fascism—not through alienation and austerity, but by looking in front of us and picking up the tools we can wield that create, not destroy. Giving and volunteering more to food banks, or even volunteering to keep our city clean with community clean-ups, helping city staff, and lending our learned skills pro-bono to help out where we can are other community-based tools of mutual aid. 

Suppose the city’s residents embrace community and invest in one another, treating this as the all-hands-on-deck situation it is. The city grows in power and will be in a position of power as it stands against a GOP-controlled legislature because we are standing on our own. We truly have the resources we need to stand on our own, but we have to be willing to let go of the individualistic pressure fascism puts on us.

We have to think strategically about our choices and how they will ripple out, not in a one-issue specific way, such as focusing on housing, but with a systems analysis of our political and social reality. When you widen your view, there is one choice: to vote yes and fully embrace each other, creating and building community. 

This isn’t a referendum on the mayor; that’s what local elections are for. It is a referendum on where we stand—as individuals, embracing fascist alienation, or as a progressive community fighting alongside one another for a better future.