Fiscal Facts

The city of Milwaukee’s 2024 budget proposal features a paradigm shift: after years of warnings about its finances nearing the brink, a revenue infusion from a new sales tax and state aid increase enables the city to generally maintain existing service levels and even invest in key areas.

Wisconsin seemingly swims in an abundance of fresh water. Unlike some western states that struggle with empty reservoirs and limits on growth imposed by water shortages, our municipal water supplies facing little threat, even during summer droughts.

With real estate values rocketing upward during the COVID-19 pandemic, the gap between local property tax assessments and market values in Wisconsin is now the largest in recent memory.

Wisconsin’s 13.1% increase in total equalized property values in 2023 was the second-largest percentage increase since at least 1985, topped only by slightly higher growth in 2022.

Rates of chronically absent students continued to increase in Wisconsin schools in the 2021-22 school year, with the reported data rising even more sharply than during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Teacher turnover surged in Wisconsin in 2023 as record numbers of teachers moved between districts, and the most teachers since 2012 left public school classrooms altogether.

During the COVID-19 pandemic and its immediate aftermath, employment in higher-paying occupations in Wisconsin stayed largely stable, while thousands of lower-paying jobs were lost.

Key pillars of Milwaukee County’s justice system are not functioning in the same way, or at the same level, as they did prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Wisconsin’s cities and villages increased their overall spending in 2021, but it still lagged rising inflation.

The number of Wisconsin high school students earning college credit through dual enrollment programs at public universities and technical colleges has more than doubled in the past decade.