Calumet County

June 2020. Look at the top left corner of the image. See Appleton? That's the city the US post office assigned as our zip code. But we don't live in the yellow area of Appleton. In fact, we don't live in Appleton. And we don't live in the county that most people associate with Appleton, which is Outagamie County (see even higher upper left). When I went to get my Wisconsin car title, the clerk was at first confident that my Appleton address included residence in Outagamie County (each county assesses different taxes on cars so this was important), but as the new resident, I was able to convince her otherwise.

Where do we actually reside? Well, move your eyes just a short distance to the right from 'Appleton' and you will see Darboy. Some people in our neighborhood would say that we live in Darboy. Well, sort of. But Wisconsin towns, villages and cities have some peculiarities, so drop down from the letter 'o' in Darboy to near the road marker 'N' and we are just to the right of the N. And, again here is the quirk, we actually live in the village of Harrison, whose spot on the county map is well south of where we live, but the village actually arcs around Sherwood and includes us in the NW corner of the county. And while Chilton (look south), population around 3,900, is the county seat, Harrison has perhaps the largest, densest population in the county, with about 8,000 people. As I noted to Gaby, there are about as many people in the four hundred square miles (397, to be precise) of Calumet county as there are working and learning on the square mile of the UCLA campus, about 49,000 people.

The burning issues I pick up from the community Facebook page reflects another quirk of our highly agricultural state. Calumet county probably has more cows than people; this is one of the most dairy-intense counties in the United States, although you would not know from where we live in the 'suburbs' of Appleton. That also means that there are a lot of roads to be maintained, few manufacturers for the tax base, few people per square mile, and a belief in well-funded schools, including a pretty good voucher system. Wisconsin has also capped the annual property tax increase that makes road repair more of a cost assigned to those who live along the road than a cost collectively shared by the homeowners and businesses of the county. From what I've gathered, if you own a farm along a half-mile stretch of road and that road needs repaired, you pay the bill for the repair. One case I saw had a farmer stock with a $240,000 assessment. Ouch!

Ironically, there are people upset about the one thing that might help build the tax base, and that means converting farmland to residential neighborhoods. The development in which we live has about 100 homes, average price more than twice the Appleton average and even more of a multiple of a similar sized existing house on a small lot in Calumet. These new homeowners/taxpayers are seen as the root of the 'urbanization' of the county, driving up land prices, pressuring farmers to sell to developers, and demanding more services, such as more school buildings for the new families.

It's a real quandary: Grow and feel growing pains, or limit growth and spread the pain around.