How it works

About

Milwaukee Budget Decoder explains the City of Milwaukee’s 2027 budget as the Mayor proposed it to the Common Council, for residents and for reporters. It is an independent, personal project by Tarik Moody. It is not an official City of Milwaukee website and is not affiliated with any news organization.

Everything here describes a proposal. The Common Council reviews and amends the budget before adopting it in November, so the numbers can still change. The site explains what the documents say; it doesn’t argue for or against any spending choice.

How the numbers are checked

Every figure comes from two documents the city published: the Proposed Plan and Executive Budget Summary (224 pages) and the Proposed Detailed Budget (455 pages). A program reads their tables into a database, and each row keeps its address in the documents: which book, which PDF page, which printed page and, for line items, which line.

Twenty key figures, such as the all-funds total, the tax rate and the Police budget, were read by hand from the documents. Every change to the site is checked against them, and against the documents’ own totals (departments add up to their section, sections add up to the budget). If any check fails, the change can’t go live.

Plain-language definitions and background facts were written from the documents and reviewed by a person before publishing. Where the documents disagree with themselves, the site shows the printed figure and says so in a note.

The chat works on the same rule. The AI model picks which lookup to run and writes the sentences around the result; the figures come from the database with their pages, never from the model. It can still word things poorly, so check any figure you plan to use against its source page. The code is public on GitHub.

How we calculate your receipt

Your City Receipt estimates what the city charges one property, under the 2026 budget and under the Mayor’s proposal for 2027.

1. We find the property in the city’s Master Property File (MPROP), the public list of every parcel and its assessed value.
2. City property tax: the 2026 assessment times the proposed 2027 rate, divided by 1,000. The 2026 figure uses the 2025 assessment and the 2026 rate.
3. Where it goes: the same assessment times each part of the rate (city operations, debt, pensions and so on). Only this split is exact; property tax isn’t set aside for individual departments.
4. City charges: the garbage fee for each home (when the city collects garbage there), snow and ice and street lighting by the foot of street frontage, and the average household sewer and stormwater charge.
5. Renters see the building’s total divided by its number of homes. The owner pays it; the budget doesn’t show how much of it reaches rent, so the receipt doesn’t guess.

What the receipt assumes

• 40 feet of street frontage, the typical property the budget itself uses, because the property file has no frontage.
• City garbage service for homes with one to four units; larger buildings usually hire private haulers.
• One garbage cart, and an average household’s sewer and stormwater charge (actual charges depend on water use).
• Condo buildings list no unit numbers in the property file, so condo owners type in their unit’s assessed value.

What it leaves out

Only the city’s part of a property tax bill. Milwaukee Public Schools, Milwaukee County, the Metropolitan Sewerage District (MMSD) and Milwaukee Area Technical College (MATC) set their own taxes, and state credits reduce the bill. Tax-exempt and state-assessed properties get no estimate.

Privacy

The addresses you type aren’t stored or logged. Owner names and mailing addresses from the property file are never loaded. The shareable receipt image leaves out the address and the assessed value.