It’s the Holiday Season at the lake, which means a few different things to different people. For starters and finishers, it means the Village of Williams Bay sent their Christmas/Hanukkah presents to its residents. The village gives gifts all year long, don’t forget, so it’s not like a once a year sort of thing here. The Village offers its residents hideous overhead power lines, cracked sidewalks, aggressive police enforcement of modest traffic laws, mediocre maintenance of its lakefront, and more. But the Village saves the best for the holiday season, and last week delivered to its residents their property tax bills. Merry Christmas, from the village whose now unelected trustee told its residents last year that “it didn’t need tax revenue.” I’m partially surprised the village even mailed the tax bills, given the cost of postage these days.
Williams Bay hired an organization to perform a re-assessment of the Village this year, which elicited outcry over the summer open book review period. They ratcheted assessed values higher, but as is the case with municipalities, the increased assessments did not necessarily mean an increase in total taxes received. It’s a fun little accounting bit, where the assessed values are increased but the mil rate drops. The goal should be to even out the two so the assessments more accurately represent fair value but the taxes themselves remain stable. With the village fighting any effort to have an increase in tax base over recent years, it seemed reasonable to expect the large assessment increase would not mean a considerable increase in taxes.
What a cute idea that was. What the village actually did was hammer most lakefront owners and give everyone else a stable, or slightly reduced, tax bill. Why this bothers me so much isn’t because my client base largely resides on the lakefront, nor because my 81 year old retired school teacher parents live on the water (due only to the fact that in 1971 school teachers with no family money could afford lakefront homes here). It’s because it feels predatory to me.
I see examples of this municipal predation all over the lakefront in the Bay today. I see tax bills on old lakefront cottages owned by elderly part time residents that nearly doubled from 2024 to 2025. These lakefront owners mostly don’t use the school systems. They don’t strain the roadways or other municipal services. They don’t get special gold garbage cans with every day collection. They just have the fortune of having bought something that increased in value over the decades, or generations, or ownership. Of course it’s en vogue to root against owners who have things that others do not, but regardless of the political passions du jour, I find the practice of singling out a segment of a municipality to bear a monstrous tax burden to be insulting.
They did not single out lake access associations in general, even thought those off-water homes have seen tremendous valuation gains over recent years. I see many properties with lake access that have market values of $1M that boast new assessments of $600k. They specifically targeted the lakefront, and if you don’t believe me, go ahead and look up a few old cottages on the water and see what happened to the taxes between last year and this one. The valuations on the lakefront are not uniformly accurate, either. There are lakefront homes whose value exceeds $13M being taxed very similarly to lakefront homes whose value would struggle to find a $7M handle. The assessments appear to be random and terribly inaccurate, with one exception: entry level lakefront cottages. But even that isn’t as simple as it seems, since there are some cottages that skated through this assessment, and others that were not so lucky. Some large lakefronts entirely bucked the valuation trend and actually saw their taxes reduced. If the assessor was aiming to make sure their valuations made absolutely no sense, they succeeded in their mission.
If the Village had an amazing thing going, I might forgive it. If there were aesthetic municipal improvements of note that needed paying for, perhaps we could give these new tax bills a pass. But the village offers nothing but the most basic expected conditions and services, and yet feels entitled to more and more of your hard earned money. I guess it’ll be new iPads for the kids again this year. But not just any iPad, maybe it’ll be iPad Pro’s this time. Merry Christmas, now pay up.