WAUSAU, Wis. (WSAU) — A packed Marathon County Board room listened to a consultant’s report on the financial health of the village of Brokaw Tuesday. The village’s outlook is bleak.
One of the experts that studied the options for the village with 251 residents is Michael Konecny, a certified public accountant with Schenck S.C from Green Bay. He says when Wausau Paper closed the mill, the village lost over a third of it’s tax base. “This isn’t something that Brokaw brought on themselves. When you lose a third of your tax base, things need to happen and they’re just no longer sustainable as a village.”
Konecny says they have government expenses, a stressed tax incremental district, and some very expensive utilities that are costing the village a lot of money. “The utilities are the big problems. You can operate a little government just doing general type services, but you can’t operate utilities with a limited number of customers, and especially when they’re built to serve way more.”
The Village of Brokaw won’t survive unless something changes. They could sell the water and the sewer utilities. The recommended option is for Brokaw, the Towns of Texas and Maine, and the City of Wausau to negotiate a shared services agreement. “The water utility is already connected to Wausau, so it’s not a connection problem, because they buy the majority of their water from Wausau right now, so it’s just a matter of absorbing it within the Wausau area, providing manpower to operate it, and the customers of Brokaw then become customers of the Wausau water utility. I wouldn’t say it’s common, but it has happened before.”
Attorney Andy Phillips from Phillips-Borowski Law Firm from Mequon says no Wisconsin municipality has ever been through a situation quite like this. He says in Wisconsin, you can dissolve the village but you cannot do what Detroit did. “You cannot file bankruptcy as a Wisconsin municipality. On a dissolution, they have a statutory right to dissolve, and if they do that, again there are unanswered questions as we learned tonight, so one of the processes that they could explore is asking a court for assistance through a receivership-type model to oversee the dissolution process because of all of those unanswered questions.”
If Brokaw were to dissolve, the assets and the debt would revert to the Towns of Maine and Texas, which would put a strain on them.
Phillips says it is fair to say that there are just two options. Either Maine and Texas work with Wausau and Brokaw allowing shared services or a Wausau annexation, or they accept Brokaw’s debt of over 3.8 million dollars. “That’s about what it comes down to, and that’s assuming the City of Wausau is willing to consolidate with Brokaw, which I don’t know if that’s a viable option or not. I don’t know what city leadership things about the entire prospects, so even if the towns were to allow that, it’s still incumbent on the city to say yes as well, which is why it’s really the four jurisdictions getting together and agreeing on an overall plan.
Marathon County Administrator Brad Karger worked on behalf of the County Board to gather facts for the analysts. He is optimistic the four municipalities can get together and strike a deal. “Yes, I think they can. It’s going to be a real opportunity to show some real leadership. I think that in the end, a lot of people are going to do a lot of things that they think they shouldn’t have to do and don’t want to do in order to make this whole thing work out and avoid something much worse.”
Phillips urged the parties to “sit down tomorrow” to begin the process. He said these things are very complex and recommended Brokaw officials seek outside assistance to work through the problems.
The next move is now up to Brokaw’s Village Board.
