(The Center Square) – Milwaukee’s new 2% sales tax is now law, but what comes next is still up in the air.
Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson on Friday signed the city’s new sales tax into law.
“We’ve accomplished something huge, something major, something extraordinary for our city,” Johnson said at the signing ceremony.
The new sales tax is expected to bring in nearly $200 million per year once it begins next year.
The money must be spent on police officers, firefighters, roads, and Milwaukee’s pension debt. Republican lawmakers wrote spending restrictions into the law that allowed Milwaukee to create its tax.
Those restrictions bar the city from spending the tax money on its streetcar, The Hop, or on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
Some Milwaukee leaders are talking about a lawsuit to challenge those restrictions, but Mayor Johnson is not necessarily among them.
“There are opportunities for us to still have our values met,” the mayor told a crowd at the Milwaukee Press Club Thursday. “Whatever route we take in terms of challenging these policy provisions, those things are already being discussed.”
Johnson said he doesn’t like the spending restrictions, but said he’s working with his legislative team to go back to lawmakers and try to get them repealed.
It will be a difficult ask.
Not only because Republicans have said the idea of a lawsuit is insulting, but because Johnson accused Republicans of specifically targeting the city.
“They had a desire to do this,” Johnson added. “And they did it because they knew we were handicapped. So it didn’t really matter if they did it to the city or the county, their point was that they wanted to do it. And there was an opening to do it.”
Johnson also defended the deal that brought Milwaukee both the spending restrictions and the new sales tax.
“The mission to put the city on a fiscally-solvent path was accomplished,” Johnson said Thursday. “Do I like the [spending restrictions]? No. I still dislike the policies. I wish they were not there in the beginning, and I wish that they were not there presently.”
