Green Bay is the first municipality to itemize the cost of private school vouchers on property tax bills, and Mayor Eric Grenrich said the line-item makes residents more aware of what he regards as a broken education funding system. The state has released $125 million to help communities across the state access clean drinking water, and Stella Town Chairperson William Casey Crump said he looks forward to this money helping address contaminated wells or support whole-house filter systems.

Mayor Eric Genrich
Mayor, Green Bay

• April 7 ballots will see more than 70 school district referendum questions across the state seeking additional funding from taxpayers. The squeeze is the result of an increase in per pupil revenue limits without accompanying state funding and reimbursement of costs of special education costs at a rate of 35%, lower than had been expected. Some people want residents to see what else is contributing to the cost: private voucher schools, and Green Bay is the first municipality in the state to show those costs on residents’ property tax bills. Genrich was the tie-breaking vote to include that line item on the bills.
• Genrich: “Nobody ever really likes paying a property tax bill, but they want to know where those funds are going. And so when this was brought forward to our common council, that really was the winning argument. It’s something that our public school district has been calling for for several years. Our previous council shot it down. This council moved it forward, and allowed us to work with the Department of Revenue with our county treasurer to figure out exactly how we can place this information on the bill. But, you know, for Green Bay area taxpayers, $14 million is going for this purpose, just under $10 million for the city of Green Bay proper. So that’s a big number. You break it down to the average homeowner — you know a $300,000 home — I think that’s about $270 going for, this voucher program.”

William Casey Crump
Town Board Chairperson, Town of Stella

• After years of delay, state funding will finally be released to Wisconsin communities poisoned by PFAS “forever chemicals.” The town of Stella, located in Oneida County in northern Wisconsin with a population of about 650 residents, is pegged as having one of the worst PFAS contaminations of drinking water sources in the nation. Crump said the state Department of Natural Resources linked the source of the PFAS to a paper company that made microwave popcorn bags and is now providing bottled water to residents. He said he hopes the $125 state money allocated to address this pollution can go toward long-term approaches like digging new private wells or whole-house filtration systems, even as the DNR works on setting up new grant programs to distribute the funding.
• Crump: “The way it is right now is the DNR did have some funds that they made available for people to have their wells redrilled. The problem is when those redrills were done, they still had PFAS in their water, which made their water undrinkable. Some of them came up, still had PFOAS, but it was below the level. So, the secondary treatment on that is to put in a water treatment system in your — I feel like we don’t want a kitchen faucet treatment, we want a whole house treatment system because if you’re only getting your drinking water from your kitchen sink, it’s very hard to brush teeth, it makes it much more difficult. That’s why a whole-house system would be important. Those are expensive, so again, money for that would be a blessing.”

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