From Luke N. Berg 

Deputy Counsel, Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty

Dear Monroe School District Board:  

As you are well aware, many voters and taxpayers in Monroe, perhaps most, did not understand the tax impact of last fall’s $88 million referendum, due to repeated statements by the District that the net impact would be an increase of $13 in taxes per $100,000 in home value. The true impact was ten to fifteen times that. The District has already apologized and acknowledged to voters that its communications about the costs were misleading. We submit this letter to urge the school board to do more — to pause the project and call for a special referendum, under Wis. Stat. §§ 8.06 and 8.55, to re-submit the question to the voters, so that they can vote with accurate information. If the District wants to “regain the public’s confidence,” as it has acknowledged it needs to do, the best way to do that is to let voters decide knowing the true costs.  

To be clear, we have no opinion on whether the Monroe School District should build a new high school; but we strongly believe that voters should have accurate financial information and be able to trust the information given to them by the government officials who have primary access to and understanding of the numbers. In a situation like this where the costs were so grossly misunderstood, due to the way the District communicated about them, it is impossible to say that the referendum result represents the “will of the electors.” Wis. Stat. § 5.01(1). The right thing to do in this situation is to redo the referendum. The board can, and should, offer that to voters.   

As the Wisconsin Supreme Court wrote nearly a century ago, “Nothing is more important in a democracy than the accurate recording of the untrammeled will of the electorate. Gravest danger to the state is present where this will does not find proper expression due to the fact that electors are corrupted or are misled.” State ex rel. Hampel v. Mitten, 278 N.W. 431, 435 (1938). Consistent with that sentiment, Wisconsin law prohibits “knowingly mak[ing] or publish[ing] … a false representation pertaining to a … referendum which is intended or tends to affect voting at an election.” Wis. Stat. § 12.05. 

— The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty is a nonprofit conservative law firm based in Milwaukee, and was founded in 2011.