In August of 1993, the Wisconsin State Legislature set in place Act 16, which limited the amount of revenue a school district could receive each year. Now some 28 years later, the local revenue limit worksheet is done for the Stanley-Boyd School District, and the levy rate for local taxpayer’s contribution to S-B district education in the 2020-21 school year is set to come in at just $6.92 per $1,000, a full 24 cents BELOW what it was last year in 2019. This comes after it was earlier projected to rise by a full 65 cents this year, meaning that the local school levy will be a full 89 cents below its previous prediction.

The S-B district levy rate of $6.92 per $1,000 for this year is ultimately meant to raise approximately $2.875 million (when rounded up) towards a total district budget of over $16 million once state and federal sources are added in. The left-over annual fund balance for the 2020-21 school year once expenditures are taken out, meanwhile, is projected to be $21,354 in total, far below balances from before revenue limits were enacted through the passage of Act 16, to judge by a non-representative sampling of past newspapers. Non-representative samples, however, cannot be used to make general statements in statistics.

That being said, the 2020-21 school levy rate for Stanley-Boyd as passed at the October 26 board meeting is currently the lowest it’s been since at least 1996, allowing for a gap in the data from 1998 and a “one-time deal” from the year 2000, when the fund balance for a priorly approved building project was applied to the following year’s budget as an aideable expense, resulting in the jaw dropping and hard to beat total district levy goal of $739,247 or $3.33 per thousand, before bouncing back the following year to $7.33 per thousand.

In any case, the pleasant school levy rate surprise of $6.92 for district taxpayers in 2020 comes after an increase of 5.91 percent in equalized property values from 2019 for the district area, well above the projected point six two percent rise in inflation for the twelve month period ending September 2020. Perhaps not surprisingly, the line graph of the district levy follows the mill rate, as it applies only to needed local contributions, and not the overall budget itself. More surprising, but still somewhat explainable once all the facts are in, is a slight rise followed by a slow downward trend in the mill rate over the past twelve years of so, even as the overall school levy amount has held steady or continued to rise. How’d that happen?

While there are many potential factors involved, one could be that the general trend within local fair market (equalized) property values that saw 2019 property values finish out at a cumulative 45.6 percent in value compared to 2001, just narrowly exceeded cumulative inflation for the same period of 44.4 percent, calculated via www.usinflationcalculator.co m. While slight, this means that for all but three of the past twenty years (these three being 2002, 2010, and 2011), the net percentage increase in local property valuation from the year previous has shown growth in line with and/or at least partly independent from inflation, resulting in a higher net value from causes which are inclusive of but not limited to a depreciation in the buying power of the U.S. dollar (thru inflation).

Although a sharp decrease in equalized property value did occur between 2008 to 2009, this did not enter into negative territory taken as a net value from the previous year, hitting bottom at 1.5 percent, whereas inflation did at -0.4 percent for 2009. All told, however, the net increase in equalized value edged out inflation by 1.2 percent, while fluctuations in the property valuation of individual municipalities within the Stanley-Boyd district resulted in slight adjustments to overall contribution percentages for each member municipality to the district tax levy, as will happen.

In line with the nature of a federal republic, however, the local school district is just one of many local governments looking for funds in the upcoming budget year and local taxpayers should still keep their antennae up in terms of how much they might owe to the public purse in this our local and constitutionally organized federal republic— it’s the cost of civilization and good town roads.