Delafield Property Tax Hike Has Waukesha Residents Nervously Checking Mail

WAUKESHA — I have spent 31 years of my professional life keeping this city's infrastructure functional, which means I have also spent 31 years watching this city's residents locate something to worry about, and I want to say, with the full weight of that experience behind me, that what's happening right now over in Delafield is not our problem. I want to say that. I am not sure anyone on Nextdoor believes me.

Delafield voters on Aug. 18 approved a referendum authorizing a $450,000 annual property tax levy increase running through 2030, money the city says it needs for road maintenance and a new fire pumper truck. It passed. It is Delafield's business. It is 15 minutes down the road from Waukesha by car, longer if you catch the freight train, and I have counted no fewer than eleven Nextdoor posts since Tuesday morning referencing it, none of which were posted by anyone who lives in Delafield.

Patricia Schmitz, 58, who lives on my block and whom I have known since her son played rec league baseball with mine, told me she has started checking her city of Waukesha municipal email alerts "three times a day," a habit she did not have last week. "I just want to know before it happens," she said. I asked her what "it" was. She said she wasn't sure yet, but she'd know it when she saw it.

"I wouldn't say we have a tax increase planned. I also wouldn't say a fire pumper truck couldn't happen to anybody."

— Councilman Gary Puchalski

What The City Is Actually Saying

I called Councilman Gary Puchalski, because I generally find that a direct question produces a more useful answer than a Nextdoor thread, though not always by much. Puchalski confirmed Waukesha has no similar levy proposal on the table "as far as he's told anyone yet," a phrasing I asked him to clarify twice. He would not clarify it further. "There's no plan," he said. "I'm not aware of a plan. If there were a plan, I don't know that I'd be the one telling you first, but there isn't one, so it doesn't matter." I found this reassuring in the way a doctor's "we'll keep an eye on it" is reassuring, which is to say not very, but I wrote it down anyway.

I should note the two cities do not share a levy, a budget, a school district, or, as far as I am aware, a single line item. Delafield residents voted on Delafield's fire pumper truck. Nothing about that referendum obligates Waukesha to do anything at all, a fact I have now explained to four separate neighbors, three of whom nodded and then asked if I'd heard anything from City Hall.

The Coffee Shop Theory

I stopped in at the coffee shop on East Avenue Wednesday morning, mostly for the coffee, and ended up in a 20-minute conversation at the next table over about whether Waukesha's public works budget could "absorb a hit like that," a phrase that assumes a hit is coming, which nobody at that table could actually confirm. One man, whom I did not recognize, said his cousin's coworker heard something at a school board meeting. I asked which school board meeting. He said he wasn't sure it was a real meeting.

This is, I'll grant, a very Waukesha way to spend a Wednesday morning. We do not wait for bad news. We locate the general vicinity of where bad news might eventually originate, and then we monitor that vicinity closely, the way Ned England monitors his neighbor's Honda, until either something happens or we simply run out of vicinity to monitor.

My Actual Advice

I checked with the city assessor's office directly, and as of this week there is no proposed levy increase, no referendum on the fall ballot, and no fire pumper truck under discussion that anyone will admit to. I recognize that "no fire pumper truck under discussion that anyone will admit to" is not the same as "no fire pumper truck," and I understand why that distinction is not comforting anybody.

My advice, for what 31 years with the DPW is worth: check your mail like a normal person, once a day, and reserve your worrying for something you can actually verify is happening. Patricia Schmitz told me she'd think about it. She checked her email twice more while we were talking.