In October 2022, how will Madison and Fitchburg split the Town of Madison’s assets? What will happen to their employees? How does this work with redistricting? Are the town’s properties under assessed and what happens with the city’s higher tax rates? How will we give Town residents the same level of service when we won’t get levy increases sufficient to do the work? So many questions!
During the budget there were several remarks about what happens when parts of the Town of Madison are absorbed into the City in October 2022. There was a presentation to the Common Council Executive Committee about issues related to the dissolution, here’s what they were told and what the plans to make decisions are.
If you want to watch along start at the 2nd to last dot at 16:38
Jeff Greger from Planning is with Laura Larson from Finance to brief them on the Town of Madison final attachment process.
A couple of highlights of the agreement this all happens on October 31st 2022 at 11:59 p.m. The Town asses will need to be allocated between the City of Fitchburg and the City of Madison. The agreement as I recall, doesn’t really specify the percentages so that that will need to get worked out. Although the town hall will be within the City of Madison the City of Fitchburg will actually own the property as well as the fire and EMS assets. And then finally town employees that are not offered comparable employment with the City of Madison or City of Fitchburg will be entitled to a lump sum severance package.
A few numbers to consider as part of this attachment. The City of Madison will see approximately 5,000 new residents that equates to about just under twenty-four hundred additional housing units. 1400 unique parcel numbers coming into the city that equates to about just under 600 acres of land. We will be inheriting the center 12 miles of sanitary sewers, 3 lift stations. 4.5 miles of a storm sewer pipe, 1 stormwater detention Pond, just shy of 38 miles of streets, one bridge and two parks.
Some of the social economic characteristics of the town compared to the city. The town is fairly young as compared to the city of Madison about 23% of the population in the town of Madison is under the age of 18 compared to just under 18% in the city and the over-65 population is only 4.4% of population which compared to Madison is just under 10. The average household income significantly lower than the average $36,641 compared to the city’s $59,387. A fairly large population that are living below the poverty line just under 32% of the town population is living below the poverty line compared to 18% of the population for the city. Housing tenure is another big difference compared to the city. 72% rent in the town and 27% own compared to the cities almost fifty-fifty breakdown. Looking at race it’s a lot more diverse as compared to city populations so just under 55% of the population is white, 20% black/African American, just under 6% Asian. Unfortunately the census lumps a lot of other races into some other race they don’t split it out and that’s a fairly large percentage of the population 19.4%.
Alder Shiva Bidar asks about the census question about Hispanic/Latino and ethnicity, is that data not available or why is that data not there. Greger says they have the data, it is just not included in the slide. Bidar says the town has a very, very large latinx community so knowing what that percentage is is going to be very critical. Greger says they can include that in the future presentations.
Alder Patrick Heck asks if there is a concern that private property values are somehow lower than they should be or is it just that taxes will change.
It is largely driven by the tax rate and the differences between the City and Town current tax rate.
Dave Schmiedicke says the City Assessor feels that probably a great deal of property in the town is undervalued relative to the approaches that we take in the city, so the City Assessor is going to be interested in, as rapidly as possible, reassessing all property in the Town. That has to be balanced against what Laura was saying in terms of other priorities but he thinks she has concerns about assessments levels. It will be both assessment levels and the tax rate disparity.
Bidar says a year-and-a-half ago or so I had the conversation with the previous mayor and others about the sale of a lot of the rental properties which is as we saw, a good majority of the stock off of housing in town currently, sold to property owners out of the state because just the simple fact that it will be a City of Madison address already creates for them an investment because they know the property is going to go up and that they will be able to raise the rents. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that in the mean time the transfers are happenign and there is already displacement happening because the investors know what they are doing in advance so they are already displacing residents. Is there any work that is being done not in 2022 to avoid that transfer. Any conversations with the Town of Madison currently.
Heather Stouder from planning says there are not conversations with the Town going on now, but they are looking at ways to combat displacement citywide right now, in fact there will be a white paper presented to the council in the coming weeks on that issue. It’s a little bit difficult for us now since the town isn’t in the city, to have direct impacts on those sorts of things, absent land purchase ourselves. That is one tool to consider as part of our tool box, landbanking and purchase of land ahead of time. But she doesn’t think they entered into any of those conversations yet with properties in the Town.
Alder Barbara Harrington-McKinney says when she was in a meeting when the offer for the town of Madison to come in earlier and there was a room full of almost a hundred people and they totally rejected that. In the conversation what they were saying is that they were concerned about the deterioration and the services that had already scaled back and streets and roads in some of those service and so I hear that we don’t have any idea what those cost factors would be but you already anticipating that you’ll discover there is more in terms of bringing that to the level of the standard with the city, they are not at the level at the city, and so that there will be a lot of impact that we haven’t even looked, but the reality is that its going to happen, could you speak more to that.
Larsen says that is the goal around the work of the asset inventory and service inventory. Engineering has really been out in front on this, so they’ve been doing a lot of work about getting a lot of the Public Works stuff that will come into their purview like the streets and the infrastructure under the streets and they’ve also been very proactive about assigning quality levels to that so that they can prioritize once we once the town is attached how do we bring that up to our level. Also knowing that the town has been scaling back services because the attachment is coming, as part of the service review they will be asking if there are certain things that we could start doing before October 31st 2022 so that we can enter into those conversations. Again in that vein we are able to start to scale service back up in those areas and we don’t have to do it all over night. I think we do anticipate that there is kind of a disconnect between the levels of service in some ways that Town residents are experiencing today and what that will look like when they’re City residents.
Alder Grant Foster calls out sidewalks, our current policy around 100% cost to property owners for new sidewalk is an existing issue that I think the Transportation Planning and Policy Board is interested in looking at, particularly with this coming up with the residents living there being of lower income, that impact would be rally high. Just keeping it top of mind especially as you’re thinking about dividing assets and liabilities. Is there a way that with conversations with Fitchburg to assess the lack of sidewalk as a liability or expected cost to see if there is some way in that transition period to get some money from the from the dissolving Town of Madison to pay forward becuase it will be really hard to put big bills on these folks as we repair their streets and what is underneath but then the addition of sedewalks can put things over the edge. Just think creatively about ways that we might be able to incorporate that into the agreements to the degree that it might be possible.
Bidar asks about the aldermanic district and she is trying to figure out that if after the 202 census, after we redo redistricting that would be part of that conversation. Are we going to consider that census data or how is that going to happen.
Heather Stauder says they can’t directly consider it and place town residents into city aldermanic districts, but I think we want to be strategic about where the district lines are drawn in late 2020 and 2021 we want to make sure that the town residents can be adjacent to multiple City aldermanic districts so that there are some opportunities for a single District. The rationale for that is that on one hand all of a sudden 5,000 new residents come into the city. Our aldermanic districts are about 13,000 a piece, 13 or 14,000 and all of a sudden one district would balloon into a much larger district so they want to make sure that the lines are drawn during the redistricting process to allow them the most flexibility possible with regard to where the town residents will end up, which district they’ll end up in, once it does come into the city in late 2022.
Grant Foster asks when the redistricting is implemented. Bidar says in the election of that year. Heather Stouder says she believes it will be late 2020 or early 2021. The census needs to be completed so we have the final counts and then redistricting occurs after we get the final counts and we try to make sure that we have a balanced set of aldermanic districts by number. Foster says he think it’ll be accomplished ahead of the . . . Stauder says it will need to be accomplished before 2022 unfortunately.
Bidar says that getting that timeline would be good. Her recollection was that it was 2 years after the census. Because it takes like literally a year to get the results and then from a committee that discuss how to redistrict based on those results takes time, it doesn’t happen immediately. Her recollections was that it was ’13 when it was redistricted so she thinks its 2023. Stauder says they will double check. Bidar says that is whay she was asking the question. Stauder says its a great question and they’ve been assuming internally that it must happen before late 22 but they will look at it again. Bidar is pretty sure Alder Foster is correct that it is the elections of April 2023 that the 2020 results end up in the new district becasue the last time it was 2013 for the 2010 census. Stouder says “okay, we’ll take a look at that”
Heck asks about the future work of placing them near aldermanic districts, multiple aldermanic districts, but he would hope there would be some consideration given to not carving up existing communities so that they don’t lose their identity.Stouder says that is absolutely an important consideration that they have talked about at the staff level. You don’t want to dilute the voting power of that area as well, so that has to be taken into account and possibly what that means is that we are looking at the North sides of those abutting districts and moving some properties away from the north side of the district’s into districts to the north of them. So I think that’s a that’s a great consideration.
I was on the Fitchburg Plan Commission when the plan to divvy up the town of Madison was hatched — behind closed doors. The main concern was dividing up the physical assets. Human beings weren’t really in the assets column. They weren’t described that way, but everyone knew they were in the liability column. And they didn’t really enter into the political equation between Mayors Sue Bauman and Mark Vivian, and town chairman Jim Campbell. Location, location, location, and how to deal with a dysfunctional unit of government were the issues.