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Board reviews potential wheel tax revenue; members note data uncertainty and limited yield for small village
Summary
Trustees discussed Wisconsin DOT vehicle-registration data suggesting a potential pool of vehicles that could generate wheel-tax revenue; members flagged address/mailing discrepancies and noted a wheel tax in Hortonville would generally be limited to road spending and likely raise modest funds compared with denser cities.
Trustees discussed potential revenue from a wheel tax after staff (Grace) shared Wisconsin Department of Transportation registration counts for the Hortonville ZIP code area.
Grace said the DOT printout listed roughly 4,005 vehicle registrations for the area she examined, which could generate tens of thousands of dollars if a per-vehicle wheel tax were enacted. She and others cautioned that the DOT data uses ZIP-code mailing addresses and may not match resident counts inside village limits; the DOT would provide more precise address-level counts only after a tax is in place.
Several trustees and staff said Hortonville’s lower population density means a wheel tax would likely raise less revenue than in a city such as Appleton and that state rules limit wheel-tax revenues to road-related spending. One trustee noted equity concerns: a wheel tax charges per vehicle and can be regressive for households with multiple registered vehicles who may not generate proportionally more road use. The board treated the conversation as informational; no vote or formal direction was recorded in the transcript.
