THE ROOTS ACT

The ROOTS Act — Returning Our Own Tax Dollars to States

Restore Local Control — Shared Revenue Reform

The people who know your neighborhood best are your neighbors. The officials who understand your community's needs most intimately are your local elected leaders — your city council members, your county supervisors, your town board representatives. These are the people closest to the problems, closest to the residents, and closest to the consequences of every decision made.

Yet for decades, Wisconsin's state government has systematically underfunded local communities while simultaneously telling them how to operate — imposing mandates without money, dictating priorities without accountability, and leaving local governments to either cut services or reach deeper into the pockets of local property taxpayers to make up the difference.

The ROOTS Act ends that arrangement.

1. Reform the Shared Revenue Formula — Stop Punishing Growth

Wisconsin's shared revenue formula — the mechanism by which the state distributes money back to local governments — is built on decades-old calculations that no longer reflect the reality of Wisconsin's communities. Growing communities like those in the Fox Valley are being systematically shortchanged because the formula hasn't kept pace with population growth, infrastructure demands, or economic development.

The result is a perverse incentive: communities that attract new residents, build new businesses, and generate new economic activity are penalized by a formula that doesn't account for their growth. Meanwhile, the costs of serving those residents — roads, public safety, parks, utilities — keep climbing.

The ROOTS Act requires a comprehensive, data-driven overhaul of Wisconsin's shared revenue formula to reflect current population, current infrastructure needs, and current economic realities. Every Wisconsin community deserves a fair share of the revenue it helps generate — not a share calculated from a snapshot taken before many of today's residents were even born.

2. End Unfunded Mandates — If Madison Wants It Done, Madison Pays for It

One of the most financially damaging practices in Wisconsin's intergovernmental relationship is the unfunded mandate — when the state requires local governments to provide a service, meet a standard, or implement a program without providing the funding to do so. The cost gets quietly shifted to local budgets, which in turn shifts it to local property taxpayers.

This is how Madison gets to take credit for policies while local communities and local taxpayers bear the cost.

The ROOTS Act establishes a simple, ironclad rule: any mandate the state imposes on local governments must be accompanied by full state funding for its implementation. No exceptions. No phase-ins without funding. No passing the bill down to local taxpayers under cover of bureaucratic language.

If Madison wants it done, Madison pays for it. If Madison won't pay for it, Madison doesn't get to require it.

3. Keep More Local Revenue Local

When Fox Valley residents pay taxes, a significant portion of that money travels to Madison before any of it comes back to the community. Along the way, the state takes its cut — and what comes back is often less than what left, distributed according to a formula designed in a different era for a different Wisconsin.

The ROOTS Act pushes to restructure this relationship so that more of the revenue generated by local communities stays in those communities — reducing the dependency on Madison as a middleman and giving local officials the resources they need to make decisions for their residents without waiting for state approval or state dollars to trickle back.

Local problems deserve local solutions funded by local revenue — not solutions filtered through a state bureaucracy that doesn't know your neighborhood.

4. Full Transparency in Shared Revenue Calculations

Right now, most Wisconsin residents have no idea how the state calculates how much money their community receives in shared revenue. The formula is complex, opaque, and understood by almost nobody outside of a small circle of state budget officials and lobbyists. That opacity is not an accident — it makes it nearly impossible for residents or local officials to identify when their community is being shortchanged or to make the case for a fairer distribution.

The ROOTS Act requires:

• Full public disclosure of how shared revenue amounts are calculated for every municipality and county in Wisconsin, in plain language that any resident can understand

• An annual public report comparing what each community contributes to state revenue versus what it receives back through shared revenue and other state funding mechanisms

• A formal review process through which local governments can challenge their shared revenue allocation if they believe the formula has been misapplied — with a clear timeline for resolution

• Publication of all unfunded mandate costs imposed on local governments, so taxpayers can see exactly what the state is requiring their community to pay for without reimbursement

5. The Local Fiscal Impact — What This Means for the Fox Valley

The consequences of Wisconsin's broken shared revenue system aren't abstract. They show up in your property tax bill. They show up in deferred road maintenance and aging infrastructure. They show up in local governments carrying debt loads that exist precisely because the state hasn't held up its end of the bargain.

Communities like Appleton, Grand Chute, and Outagamie County have been managing these shortfalls responsibly for years — finding efficiencies, making hard choices, and avoiding the kind of fiscal recklessness that drives communities into crisis. But responsible local management can only compensate for so much state underfunding for so long.

The ROOTS Act is about making the relationship between state and local government work the way it was always supposed to — with the state as a partner to local communities, not a gatekeeper standing between residents and the resources their own taxes generate.

The Bottom Line:

Wisconsin's local communities are not branch offices of state government. They are self-governing entities made up of real people with real needs — and they deserve a funding relationship with the state that reflects that. The ROOTS Act reforms the formula, ends the mandate abuse, keeps more local money local, and opens the books so every resident can see exactly how the system works. That's not a radical idea. That's just how it was supposed to work in the first place.