Milwaukee County municipalities may stand to benefit by working collaboratively to conduct property assessments, either with an in-house or contract assessor.
Milwaukee County’s 19 municipalities currently use a mix of in-house assessors and contract firms to separately determine property values. Though this approach maximizes local control, it also limits economies of scale, and leads to quite different approaches among neighboring communities. It may also at times affect the quality and uniformity of assessments.
The state Constitution generally requires that properties of equal value within a given municipality are subject to the same level of taxation. To do this, the values of properties must be assessed at the same share of their market value. That principle is particularly challenging to achieve in Wisconsin, where property assessment is divided among more than 1,840 cities, villages, and towns…