On Nov. 5, Madison residents approved a $22 million tax referendum Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said would balance the 2025 budget and provide funding to city programs and services such as buses, libraries, mental health services, and trash and recycling collection.
In the election-day vote, 57% of voters were in favor of the referendum. The tax increase is expected to cost the average homeowner more than $230 per year.
Madison’s City Council will vote to approve the Mayor’s proposed budget and make any amendments or changes to the budget during deliberations from Nov. 12-14.
One such budget amendment could restore most of the funding to the Office of the Independent Police Monitor. The Mayor’s budget calls for defunding $195,000 of the Monitor’s budget and reallocating that money towards the Imagination Center, a library proposed for Reindahl Park on Madison’s east side.
Rhodes-Conway’s budget proposal reduced funding to the Monitor’s office if the referendum passed and eliminated the police oversight completely if the referendum had failed.
East side alder Sabrina Madison is co-sponsoring an amendment, introduced by Ald. Marsha Rummel, to restore $127,000 to police oversight. The money would be used to help pay a data analyst and provide $50,000 for legal services, as well as give $13,580 to the Police Civilian Oversight Board.
Ald. John Duncan also co-sponsored the amendment.
Ald. Madison has fought for the construction of the Imagination Center in Reindahl Park, which she says would provide a community center to the east side of the city, but says that building the library can’t come at the expense of providing police oversight.
Madison says she reached out to Rummel, Duncan and other community leaders to find a way to restore as much as possible to the Monitor’s office.
“Not only did we believe in the role, we didn’t believe it should be either or,” Madison said of using police oversight funds to build the library. “We need to be able to do both. We shouldn’t force anyone to choose between these two things because, at the end of the day, the beneficiaries will be the same people using both.”
The Office of the Independent Police Monitor was created at the recommendation of an ad-hoc committee that was formed following the police slayings of Tony Robinson and Paul Heenan. Madison’s City Council approved the formation of the office in August 2020.
Between 2015 and 2019, the city of Madison paid more than $12.5 million to victims of police violence.
Rhodes-Conway said while announcing her operating budget proposal last month that building a library is a better use of city funds and would also “reduce violence” in the future by providing resources and education to youths and families.
“I felt like it was a higher priority to provide library service through the Imagination Center than to continue funding for an office that hasn’t used their entire budget since the inception of the office,” Rhodes-Conway said at a press conference last month.
The Monitor’s office is up-and-running, and is preparing to process complaints, which Madison said provides a vital service to residents.
“I want folks who are unheard and unseen to feel like if something goes wrong in this city, they have a complaint process that can hear them and take them seriously,” Madison said.
This story has been updated to reflect that Ald. Rummel is the lead sponsor on the budget amendment to restore funding to the police oversight board. A previous version incorrectly identified Ald. Madison as the lead sponsor.
