Marshfield Common Council Gets First Look at City Administrator’s 2026 Budget

Thursday, October 9th, 2025 -- 8:01 AM

(Kris Leonhardt, MMC Senior Editor) During an Oct. 6 special meeting, the Marshfield Common Council got its first look at what the 2026 city budget could look like.

According to Kris Leonhardt, MMC Senior Editor, Marshfield City Administrator Steve Barg provided a glance at the debt management outlook as well as the projected revenue.

“Our proposed new general obligation debt for this coming year is $9,660,000. If you've been with us for a while, you're thinking that's pretty high, we typically run in that $4.5-5 million range."

"You can probably guess what the difference is; it’s on the police station renovation of the Wildwood Plaza building. That's roughly half of that, $5 million,” Barg explained.

“Wastewater revenue bonds (are) about $5.7 million. For the year, we'll pay back about $3.7 million in principal on our current debt. The levy for new debt will be $4.9 million; that’s the levy portion that we're going to be including in the levy."

“Our statutory debt limit, for those who aren't familiar with this, that's 5% of our equalized value set by the state of Wisconsin. They don't want cities and villages to go in over their heads, so they say you can borrow up to 5% of your total equalized value, which for us is $114 million."

“Our existing General Obligation debt that we expect as of Jan. 1, 2026, will be $53,178,609, so it comes to about 46.5% of what we're allowed by state law. You know, nobody's excited about debt, but we all have mortgages and those kinds of things at home, and being in the 40s is considered to be generally a decent place for most communities to rest."

“Council's adopted a policy that we've talked about before. Again, if you've been around for a while, you've heard this, we want to go deeper and harder than the state. The state says you can only borrow the 5% of equalized value."

"We said, ‘Wait a minute. Take that amount and take 65% of it, and that's what we want to limit you to.’ But as I showed you earlier, we're at 46.5 so we're well within the 65% self imposed maximum that we are allowed."

“And then finally, about a quarter of our General  Obligation debt is payable by TIF districts. Why is that significant? If we get a return on investment. Ideally, we end up getting payback, and not only do we get the money returned in tax increment, but we also get the benefit of why we created districts to begin with, which are economic development and community development type projects.”

On the revenue side, Barg said that the city would see an “increase of about $300,000 roughly, from state aid, shared revenue being the bulk of that, transportation aid being a lesser portion, but a good bump."

"We were anticipating a health insurance increase this year close to 10% based on what we've been hearing at the end, it's coming to 2.6%; that's a great benefit for us in terms of what we expected this budget to look like. But on the negative side, Barg said that the tax levy increase is only going to be $66,325 over last year."

How does he know that when the tax rate hasn’t been set yet? “The amount that state law allows us to increase is so small in recent years that it's really just kind of plugged that number in and work with what you got,” he stated.

“Most of our revenues are flat. Again, if you've been around for a while, you've heard this. You know, the things that come with the clerk's office licenses, the building permit fees, all these kinds of things go up a little bit; but for the most part, it's not a lot. It doesn't add up to major revenue for us during the year."

“CPI (consumer price index) has been near 3%, I think the last I saw was 2.9, so that increases the cost of our goods and services. We've had to make some expense cuts over multiple departments to get to the finish line."

“General fund expenses have risen about 3.1% over the 2025 budget. And you have to realize, again, that the bulk of our budget is wages and benefits. Almost two-thirds of it fits into that category. So, you're giving union increases to the fire and police union."

"You're giving reasonable raises to the employees in commensurate with the pay increase, the compensation plan we just had a couple years ago. That's going to end up being the bulk of what you're facing.”

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