A total of 51 local school district referenda questions in 41 school districts will be before voters when they go to the polls on Nov. 3.
Twenty-one of the 51 ballot questions request permission to issue debt for construction of new facilities or the maintenance or remodeling of existing school facilities. Overall, voters will be asked to approve nearly $927 million in borrowing for these projects. The largest asks are in Madison ($317 million); Wausau ($155 million) and Oshkosh ($107 million). The ballot questions in these three districts alone account for 62 percent ($579 million) of the overall borrowing requested statewide.
The remaining 30 ballot questions are to support school operations and ask local district voters to approve requests to exceed state-imposed revenue limits. Of these, 10 request permission to exceed the revenue limits on a recurring (i.e., permanent) basis, while 20 request permission to exceed the revenue limits on a non-recurring (i.e., temporary or time-limited) basis. The largest recurring request is in Madison (to raise the revenue limit base by $33 million phased in over a four-year period). The largest non-recurring requests are in Oshkosh (a total of $63.55 million over a nine-year period, with a maximum annual exception of $7.95 million in years 2023-24 through 2029-20) and in Janesville (a total of $37 million over a four-year period, with a maximum annual exception of $14.5 million in 2024-25, the final year the referendum would be in effect).
In ten districts, voters will be asked to approve questions on both the issuance of debt for capital projects as well as exceeding the revenue limits. Those districts include: Auburndale, Clinton, Janesville, Madison, Niagara, Omro, Oshkosh, Richland, Wausau and Westby.
It will be interesting to see how the pandemic and its impact on the state and local economies may affect referendum results now that we are more than seven months into the economic slowdown. It may also be interesting to see how the relatively higher numbers of absentee ballots likely to be cast this November may affect the outcome.
As we reported in an earlier blog post last April as the effects of the pandemic were just beginning to be felt, 52 of the 57 referenda on the April 7 ballot were approved by district voters, a passage rate of 91.2 percent, which was close to an all-time high. This report by the non-partisan Wisconsin Policy Forum examined those results along with recent trends regarding referendum passage rates.
