County board to vote on 2025 budget later this month

ANTIGO — Last Wednesday, the county board’s administrative and finance committee approved $16.66 million in general fund spending for 2025, which — if the budget is passed by the entire county board when it convenes on Oct. 28 — would represent a 1.6% decrease in spending from 2024’s budget.

The budget proposes a $12.01 million total tax levy, a roughly 1 percent increase from the $11.88 million of the previous year.

The tax rate is set to decrease 7.2%, which would translate to homeowners paying $458.60 on a home assessed at $100,000, or $917.20 on a $200,000 home.

Though nowhere near the 60% increase that occurred in the City of Antigo, the assessed value of homes still increased nearly 9% across the county.

“As the fair market value goes up, the assessed value does not go up automatically,” Langlade County Administrator Jason Hilger said when asked about the difference in the city’s and county’s assessment increases.

“If you, say, have a house and the fair market value is $100,000, but the city only has it assessed for $60,000, when those numbers get too far apart, they reassess you for equalized value. And so, maybe what happened is the city — I know they did — they reassessed, and so the city went up quite a bit. I would say the townships must have done more equalization more recently, so we didn’t have that big change.”

The county will also short term borrow $2.4 million for capital improvement projects.

“When we add [the cost of the projects] up, it’s $4.5 million,” Hilger said. “But then we’re getting these various revenues which offset some of the things up here. So I’m subtracting $769,000 from that. So our net cost of our capital projects is $3.7 million. What I’m demonstrating is, we could borrow $3.7 million — we could. And that would free up more money for other things. But we’re short term borrowing $2.4 million. And then…we’re funding basically $1.36 million out of our operating levy.”

County road work costing $2.2 million will eat up the largest portion of that $4.5 million. Another high-ticket item would be the approximately $300,000 project to add electricity to the Perch Lake campground.

When the budget comes before the county board’s 21 members at its Oct. 28 meeting, which also will double as a public hearing, at least three fourths of the members must approve it in order for it to pass.

“I feel very optimistic with the budget because we’ve had a lot of participation and buy-in from supervisors,” Hilger said. “We had a good team that put the budget together. We held open meetings to discuss the large capital items that we’re looking to fund, and I expect full support from all the supervisors on the budget.”

The Oct. 28 budget meeting and public hearing begins at 5:30 p.m. in the Langlade County Boardroom, located in the basement of the safety building.