Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu
Last year, legislators began working on a way to increase payments to local municipalities, otherwise known as shared revenue, to combat inflation conflicts.
Shared revenue helps to fund city and town’s needs such as snowplowing and road construction.
However, payments varied between different municipalities, which was the focus of this new shared revenue bill.
State Senator Devin LeMahieu tells Seehafer News, “It wasn’t equal throughout the state, so this is a monumental task of making sure everybody got an increase, but also trying to make the payments to local municipalities fairer.”
Meanwhile, the recent state budget proposal was completed by the finance committee last week and the Senate plans to vote for it on Wednesday.
LeMahieu says that the funding needed to be distributed and invested fairly.
He noted, “The challenge is that we couldn’t use all of that money for ongoing expenses because if we put all of that into ongoing expenses we’d have a shortfall down the road.”
A large portion of the funding is being invested in a building plan, which supports government buildings and education buildings such as dorms.
The budget proposal also includes various tax cuts of over $4 billion, mainly from income taxes.
