Government Lobbies Itself… For More Government

Pass the pie, please

Sometimes, the most important moments in politics are the ones advertised as non-controversial.

It’s a sunny day, say, and everybody at the county board meeting is happy because there’s nothing contentious on the agenda. There’s just the coffee for the county supervisors to sip, along with a side dish of consent agenda, those tricks of government efficiency that allow county boards to bundle no-brainer issues together to pass in a single, uncontested vote.

On our hypothetical sunny day, one particular resolution slides quickly through with the rest. Heck, the meeting’s adjourned before the coffee can even get cold. There’s no debate or public discussion about it, and why should there be? It was just a resolution calling for the state to use common sense and give us good roads, as American as apple pie.

That’s why it was on the consent agenda, after all. Only thing is, in the blink of an eye—about the time it took for the board to approve those “non-controversial” items—your county government had officially endorsed higher taxes.

What’s problematic about our hypothetical resolution is that it’s not hypothetical at all. For that scenario is exactly what is playing out right now in a fair number of Wisconsin counties, and, if the Wisconsin Counties Association (WCA) has its way, that’s what will happen in most counties by the end of April.

Already in some counties—Oneida, Richland, Pierce, Lord knows where else—supervisors are approving this feel-good language with nary a discouraging word. Specifically, it’s a resolution backed by the WCA urging the state to adopt “sustainable” transportation funding.

Right away, when a resolution contains the word “sustainable,” we know there’s trouble in River City. Big, Big Trouble, with a capital T, as in progressives pushing higher Taxes.

According to the WCA, a special-interest group representing the incorporated institutions of county government, the goal is to build momentum heading into the next state budget cycle: “Our collective effort will show that counties throughout the state believe this issue needs to be addressed in the next budget,” the association said on its website.

The collective effort is actually more like a swindler selling gullible buyers submerged swampland. Your supervisors—at least many of them—are clueless that they are being used as patsies in a coordinated scheme by a taxpayer-funded lobbying machine, one that exists not to represent the public, but to represent government itself.

Even a cursory look at this scenario shows that the problem isn’t road funding, or the lack thereof; it’s government lobbying itself, and it does so by taking our democratic name in vain.

Panhandling in a homeless shelter

To grasp the institutional grifter that is the WCA, and its siblings, the Wisconsin Towns Association (WTA) and the Wisconsin League of Municipalities (WLM), let’s start with what is happening on the ground.

In January, the WCA launched a statewide campaign pushing counties to adopt identical resolutions calling on the Legislature to increase transportation funding. The language is carefully crafted. It calls for “adequate and reliable revenue growth”; “responsible and prudent use” of bonding; “maintain[ing] and improv[ing] Wisconsin’s transportation infrastructure”; and adjusting user fees and “other revenue mechanisms” to “sustain purchasing power.”

The model resolution claims that local governments maintain approximately 90 percent of Wisconsin’s public road miles, including county highways, town roads, and municipal streets. That’s probably true. It also argues that local officials are struggling to maintain those systems as construction costs rise and state transportation aids fail to keep pace. That’s also probably true.

“Despite modest increases from the state over the years, transportation aids to local governments remain insufficient to keep pace with inflation and rising construction costs, leaving many communities funded below 2000 levels in real dollars,” the resolution states. “Local governments throughout Wisconsin continue to struggle to perform even routine maintenance, pavement preservation, and safety improvements, resulting in deteriorating roads and bridges.”

So what do you do about that? Do our state and local leaders pitch resolutions that specify how any of that will be resolved? Do they debate solutions such as higher gas taxes, bureaucratically approved wheel taxes, and higher levy limits? Do they delve into alternatives to increased spending, including highway privatization, re-evaluations of highway expansion plans, and more competition in the construction and maintenance process?

Do they even think about consulting the public?

Of course not. Instead, they pitch vague resolutions that are little more than virtue signaling for more taxes, more fees, and more borrowing, and the WCA is planning to gather together all these declarations and tout them as public support for more government spending.

The vagueness is not an accident because once you specify the mechanism—gas tax hikes, wheel taxes, higher registration fees, expanded sales taxes—the public starts getting jumpy, or worse. So instead, the WCA is asking local governments to endorse the principle of higher funding first, and leave the political consequences for later.

The resolution itself even acknowledges that reality. Because there is a funding shortfall, the WCA declares, local governments have already been forced to borrow money and impose wheel taxes. And yet, the proposed solution is, well, more of the same, and nobody seems to think that’s odd.

Now, outside the tiny cage of the gilded resolution, if an inquiring mind were to look, the WCA on the state level has very specifically proposed all that, exposing the resolution for what it truly is. For instance, their latest legislative agenda would allow annual levy increases based on the greater of net new construction or 3 percent. Under current Wisconsin law, local property-tax levy increases are generally limited to the percentage growth in a community’s tax base from net new construction.

So, under the WCA proposal, counties could still increase the levy by 3 percent even if there was no net new construction.

The Fix Wasn’t In

If all this feels familiar, it should because we have seen this exact strategy before. As Yogi Berra would say, it’s Deja Vu all over again!

A decade ago, during the “Just Fix It” campaign, a coalition of groups known as the Transportation Development Association (TDA)—including the WCA—organized counties, cities, and towns to pass nearly identical resolutions demanding more transportation funding. Most of the resolutions contained this (familiar) language: to urge the governor and legislature to “agree upon a solution that includes a responsible level of bonding and adjusts our user fees to adequately and sustainably fund Wisconsin’s transportation system.”

By 2016, 50 of 72 counties had signed on, and more than 350 municipalities followed suit. Many more joined in the next few years after that. The messaging then was the same as now: Dare not say “raise taxes”; frame it as “fix the roads.” Just like today, the resolutions highlighted the need for additional funding without prescribing a specific solution, and local leaders emphasized that point.

“This resolution is saying how the state wants to do that is up to them,” then and current Oneida County board supervisor Robb Jensen said then. “But do something. Don’t keep doing the same old, same old, because we’re going to continue to fall farther and farther behind.”

Vagueness aside, the TDA at the state level also promoted specific revenue options, including increasing the gas tax, raising vehicle registration fees, and tolling certain Wisconsin highways. Oh, and the TDA’s executive director was at one time Craig Thompson, who also once served as the WCA’s legislative director before becoming Tony Evers’s transportation secretary. Just so you get the drift of the big-government, high-tax revolving door.

The TDA’s campaign worked, at least in shaping the debate. Because when lawmakers hear that “counties support this,” “cities support this,” and “towns support this,” it creates the illusion of a broad public consensus. But that consensus is not the public speaking. It’s not real, individual taxpayers speaking. It’s not voters speaking.

It’s the government speaking. Let’s take a look.

Taxpayer funded lobbying

Here’s where the story stops being merely dishonest and starts becoming painful, both for our pocketbooks and for our democratic spirit.

That’s because the WCA is not just an advocacy group. It is funded by taxpayer-backed county dues. What’s more, it is one of the most active lobbying organizations in Wisconsin.

According to the latest Ethics Commission filings, the WCA spent $441,070 in 2025, logging more than 1,000 hours of direct lobbying communication and another 1,411 hours of preparation and research. In 2024, it spent about $404,851 on lobbying.

That alone is a nightmare of special interest conflict. But the reality is far worse: It’s your nightmare having a nightmare, and waking you up inside an ax-murderer horror show.

Simply put, the WCA is not the only monster in the house.

Add in the League of Wisconsin Municipalities ($141,369 in 2025) and the Wisconsin Towns Association ($264,552 in 2025), and you get a combined lobbying apparatus that spent $846,991 just in 2025.

That is a full-scale, professional advocacy operation. And, to emphasize the point, it is funded indirectly but unmistakably by taxpayers. Here’s how it works:

We fork over ever-increasing portions of our paychecks to county government as property taxes; county boards then insist on joining special-interest organizations like the WCA, the WTA, and LWM to “lobby” for “their” interests, and pay dues to those organizations to fund it.

In other words, we elect county supervisors ostensibly to make decisions in our best interests and to speak for us at the state level. They then palm that duty off on lobbyists they hire with our money.

Then comes the real problem. These hired guns start lobbying, all right, just not for the county’s residents. They start lobbying for the institution of government, that is, for the incorporated body that is county government—the dues-paying officials and bureaucrats they exist to protect. In other words, they lobby for the interests of the collective bureaucracy, the institution of government, not for individual taxpayers, and those interests are almost never compatible.

The WCA’s slogan is telling in this regard: “Protecting the Interests of County Government since 1935.” Not the interests of the people, mind you, but the interests of government. The former benefits from lower taxes and lower government spending; the latter from just the opposite.

To cite just one example, in 2018, the LWM launched an effort to get local governments to pitch in financially in a campaign to advocate for higher taxes on many businesses by supporting so-called “dark store” legislation. The state’s largest business association, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, denounced what it called a taxpayer-funded effort to raise taxpayers’ taxes.

“It is laughable that taxpayer funds could be used to promote higher taxes; that is exactly what the League of Wisconsin Municipalities is trying to do,” Scott Manley, WMC senior vice president of government relations, said at the time.

The WCA is all in on the scam of using tax dollars to lobby for higher taxes. In addition to a higher local-option sales tax, in addition to raising taxes by raising the levy limit, they are advocating for allowing counties to engage in short-term borrowing for operational expenses—one of the biggest accounting no-nos you can imagine—and they are also pushing to exempt economic development and public safety expenditures for those relaxed levy limits.

Given that public safety consumes as much as a quarter of some county budgets, and sometimes more, that will drive taxes through the roof. And we taxpayers are lobbying for all this through the WCA and its official, adopted legislative agenda.

A really, really good question

All of which begs the question, why is the government lobbying the government? Why do the WCA, the WTA, and LWM even exist?

They exist because of power, bureaucracy, and control, that’s why. They have created a self-reinforcing system in which public money is used to advocate for expanding public spending. It’s taxing for taxing’s sake, and spending for spending’s sake. They exist to preserve the prerogatives of power.

If that wasn’t the reason, the counties would just ask the voters themselves—through referenda, and county board and legislative elections—what they wanted to do.

And why don’t they do that? Well, to cite one more example, several years back, Oneida County officials decided to do just that, and voters overwhelmingly rejected a specific effort to raise the levy limit for road improvements. They apparently thought the roads were funded just fine the way they were, but, in any event, that’s why the counties don’t ask taxpayers what they want to do. They can’t take no for an answer.

By passing collective vague resolutions, lawmakers don’t just hear from one county or peruse the results of a referendum. They hear from a very coached chorus.

This brings us to these groups’ transparency problems, which is an apt discussion given that this is Sunshine Week across the nation. On this, the WCA is quite consistent—it doesn’t want residents to have records of institutional government, at least not middle-class or poor residents —and it doesn’t want the public to have any of its records, period.

I know this will come as a shock, but, despite being funded by taxpayer-backed dollars, the WCA is not subject to Wisconsin’s open records and open meetings laws. Back in 2014, a state appeals court ruled that the organization is not an “authority” required to disclose records. So we have a situation where public money funds the organization, the organization lobbies for public policy, but the public cannot access its internal records.

Sure, we can see direct lobbying expenditures, but what about the communications that influence and shape these organizations’ policies? Who is talking the loudest? Who has the most influence? And what are our county leaders saying to them behind closed doors?

The messaging of our elected county officials to the WCA could be quite different from their messaging to the public back home, and that’s probably the biggest reason they should be subject to the state’s open government laws.

One of the ironies is that, while not subject to the open records law themselves, the WCA has in the past supported legislation that makes it costlier to obtain public records through open records requests—another prime example of our tax dollars being used to lobby for legislation that directly injures the people.

One measure supported by the WCA would have allowed public records’ custodians to charge a fee for redacting confidential information from records released in open-records requests, which would have caused fees for open-records’ requests to balloon and have a chilling impact on the public’s access to needed information. In testimony advocating for a change, the WCA argued that the cost of redacting information from a record is part of the cost of providing a record to a requester. God forbid that the public should be able to reasonably access records they already own without being charged for them.

Indeed, that logic should set off alarms. Providing public records is not just the cost of locating and redacting a record; it is the cost of having a democracy—it is a core function we already pay for with our tax dollars.

Reserving openness for the elite is precisely the problem we have, and the absurd notion of a tax-funded organization, itself removed from public scrutiny, pushing to close off government even more, is another nod to the idea that these groups should not exist.

This is by no means a new issue. Critics have been raising this particular issue for years, in fact. A 2019 report by Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce found that taxpayer-funded local government groups in total spent more than $5 million lobbying during the 2017–18 session, often advocating for increased taxes and regulatory authority.

And yet, little has changed. If anything, the system has become more normalized. Counties effectively have full-time lobbyists, so do towns and cities. Average taxpayers and residents supposedly have our elected officials to lobby for us, but they’re the ones hiring the professionals to lobby against us.

If counties want more funding, more flexibility, or different policies, they should make that case themselves through their elected representatives and in public. If a county board wants to pass a resolution for higher levy limits or for streets paved with gold, let them do so. Let them pass a resolution in public, without cloaking their real intentions.

Let them work with elected lawmakers to make it happen and let the chips fall where they may. That’s called protecting the public interest, and that’s the interest that needs protecting. Allowing taxpayer-funded groups to work in secrecy to promote government interests is antithetical to representative democracy.

Back in 2019, WMC put its finger directly on the problem.

“Even though Wisconsin has the fifth-highest property taxes in the country, Wisconsin businesses and homeowners are still facing an ever-increasing tax burden from local governments,” said Corydon Fish, then WMC General Counsel and Director of Tax, Transportation, and Legal Affairs. “It is especially unsettling that local governments fund private advocacy organizations and contract lobbyists that are not accountable to voters to push unpopular policies—like more taxing authority—at the state level.”

"Reforms to this process are desperately needed to protect local taxpayers,” Fish said. “Taxpayers should know their local governments are working on their behalf, not working against them to implement higher taxes or increased regulations. A more open and transparent system is needed.”

WMC urged policymakers to approve legislation that would prohibit local governments from using taxpayer dollars to pay for third-party advocacy organizations and private lobbyists. The report also recommended legislation that would prohibit the use of taxpayer dollars for issue advocacy campaigns, and prohibit third-party lobbyists from receiving state pension and health care benefits.

With the WCA up to its old tricks, such legislation is needed, now more than ever.