Yes, well, my tax bill would still have been down from last year

Update: See my proposed solution.

I like how they waited until after I wrote about my property taxes yesterday before they went public with the three stooges routine:

Milwaukee taxpayers accidentally got a $9.1 million tax break--and city and Milwaukee Public Schools officials now have a $9.1 million headache.

Because of a paperwork snafu between MPS and City Hall, the property tax bills mailed this month inadvertently left out a tax increase that the School Board approved in October.

Now fingers are being pointed, the schools are demanding that the city come up with the money, and city officials are huddling in high-level, closed-door meetings to figure out what went wrong and how it can be fixed.

Maybe it's more Marx Brothers, I don't know.

In any case, a re-evaluation of my tax bill still shows that, when adjusted for what the school tax should have been, the schools are getting fewer real dollars from me, despite a higher value for my house, than they did last year. It's no longer a 5% drop, as noted in my post yesterday, but it is a drop. And that drop is still due to Doyle's vetoes of the legislatures budget, which would have put far more than $9 million more onto the property tax.

And if the city and the district work it out without raising any taxes anywhere (shut up, it's possible), then what I wrote yesterday still stands without need of amendment.

Relatedly, it seems like Sarah Carr's back from her hiatus . . . good to see the byline again. I hope that means we'll be seeing stories soon on her study of education in China.