Discourse in the Wisconsin state legislature has been heated since the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau released its interpretation of how Gov. Jim Doyle’s budget proposal would affect property taxes.

The Bureau found that property taxes would be allowed to be raised nearly a billion dollars under Doyle’s proposal. Republican legislators have been saying Doyle has not performed up to his promises in his first hundred days as governor, the period generally used by political pundits to assess effectiveness of an elected official.

“The governor’s tax increase is unacceptable,” said Rep. Mike Huebsch, R-West Salem, in a release. “This budget isn’t close to being balanced and it contains massive tax increases. The governor made promises he can’t or didn’t intend to keep, but sooner or later he has to obey the law of this land and submit to an honest, balanced budget.”

Rep. Scott Suder, R-Abbotsford, is one of the legislatures who introduced a bill Wednesday that would freeze property taxes at their current rates for the next biennium.

“The Fiscal Bureau memo showed that under Gov. Doyle’s budget there would in fact be an increase in property taxes,” Suder said. “The Fiscal Bureau told us there would be a property tax shift, in essence making property taxes higher.”

Suder said putting a freeze on property taxes would allow government to work to restore fiscal responsibility without putting taxpayers in the lurch over the next two-year budget cycle or raiding the states transportation fund.

“We want to put a freeze on property taxes so that what you get this year is what you’d get for the next two years,” Suder said. “Gov. Doyle seems to feel the only way to solve the imbalance in the budget is to raise property taxes or raid the transportation fund.”

Suder said a similar “freeze it and fix it” proposal had been brought up in each of the last two years and that Doyle and the Republican legislature were both committed to not raising taxes.

“We were operating under the assumption that there would be no new taxes,” Suder said.

Rep. Spencer Coggs, D-Milwaukee, and Rep. Dan Schooff, D-Beloit, issued a statement Tuesday saying the Republicans’ arguments were misleading. Doyle’s budget only allows for property tax increases, it does not demand it.

“While it is correct to say that local governments will be faced with difficult decisions, it is incorrect to assume that they will be forced to significantly raise property taxes,” Schooff said in the release.

“Gov. Doyle is leading by example. He is asking local governments to follow his lead in fiscally responsible budgeting, and Wisconsin’s local officials are prepared to meet that challenge.”

Sen. Bob Welch, R-Redgranite, sponsored the bill in the Senate and acknowledged that Doyle’s proposal would not necessarily raise property taxes, but said that allowing increases would be as good as requiring them because local governments would be looking for a way to cope with funding cuts.

“When you cut towns’ aid and you’re still allowing them to raise property taxes, they’ll probably do it,” Welch said. “If I was a gambling man, I would bet a large amount of money that a town in that position would raise their property taxes.”

Welch said that local governments would assuredly raise their property taxes if they could in order to avoid cutting back their spending for vital services like schools.

“We’re not telling the Madison School District, for example, to cut. We’re just saying, ‘You’re going to have to make do with what you had this year for next year and the year after that.'”

Welch said that he expected the proposal he sponsored to receive support from the legislature and be included in the budget, but he was not sure if Doyle would approve the change. Doyle had counted on local governments being flexible enough to raise property taxes, through which they could raise almost a billion dollars to deal with cuts.

“Part of me says that he believes what he says and would sign a budget with this proposal and part of me thinks he would want to be able to say he didn’t raise taxes and didn’t cut local government and have it both ways,” Welch said.