Why is Vrakas being hammered for his minute tax hike while Walworth County officials are facing little heat for their exorbitant hike? The answers help us understand why Wisconsin is a tax hell.

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Walworth County sprawls from East Troy in the northeast all the way to Lake Geneva in the southwest. There is no dominant city with a large newspaper. What passes for a news media are small weekly papers that barely cover news and a couple of insignificant radio stations. The major Milwaukee media generally ignore Walworth County because it is such a small percentage of the overall market.

This allows big spending local officials to literally get away with governmental murder. By contrast, Dan Vrakas is held accountable by talk radio hosts like myself, bloggers and a daily newspaper that mocks him for not being even more frugal. If Walworth County officials got one-tenth the media heat as Vrakas receives, they’d never get away with a double-digit tax hike in one year.

In Wisconsin, there are a lot more Walworth counties than Waukesha counties. Local government gets little coverage from small-town papers and talk radio barely exists outside of Milwaukee. There’s nobody to stir the drink.

The Walworth County tax disgrace is also an argument for electing a full-time county executive. Counties like Racine, Milwaukee and Waukesha have elected executives (Bill McReynolds, Scott Walker and Vrakas) who can be held directly accountable for their budgets. Counties like Walworth, Ozaukee and Washington have bureaucratic administrators who prepare budgets and semi-anonymous county board members who rubber stamp them. The more accountable government is, the less likely it is to go tax crazy.

For example, Washington County, which may be the most Republican County in the state, is facing a 3.2 percent property tax levy increase. That’s 2 1/2 times greater than Vrakas’ proposal. Washington County has an appointed "administrator" who can’t be thrown out by voters. Not surprisingly, he is proposing a much larger tax hike than the elected officials in the neighboring counties.

The Freeman even ran a cartoon mocking the fact that Vrakas’ budget would result in an actual $4 tax cut for the average homeowner. (That’s because population growth results in more people paying taxes so while the levy goes up the amount from the individual property owner can go down.) That seems pretty harsh to me. Nobody else in government in this state is lowering anybody’s taxes.

But the fact that Vrakas’ feet are being held to a pretty hot fire is precisely why his budget is so much more reasonable than the one in Washington County or the tax orgy in Walworth County.

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A statewide property tax freeze would force the high-tax counties to show the kind of restraint we are now seeing from more reasonable counties. Opponents argue that local voters ought to be holding these officials accountable on their own. While that point is inarguable it’s also true that in many areas of Wisconsin we have lame news outlets that barely even report on the size of property tax increases. Some focus on the meaningless tax "rate," a figure that can be manipulated by rising property values. Others allow local officials to get away with blaming their woes on cuts in state aid despite the fact that state and local governments get fortunes from Madison.

Every tax revolt I’ve ever seen started with information from some media outlet. If the media is asleep at the switch (or even worse, in bed with the local officials), there’s no way to get any outrage built. Around here, talk show hosts like me fill that function. But who’s going to raise hell in Clintonville?

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Nobody else in the media has reported this despite my mentions on both my radio and TV shows, so I’ll give it another shot here. If he doesn’t receive cooperation from Jim Doyle campaign officials and state Elections Board members, Waukesha County District Attorney Paul Bucher will convene a John Doe criminal investigation into the board’s collaboration with the Doyle campaign to issue a ruling adverse to the Green campaign.

(Mark Belling is the host of a daily WISN radio talk show and a Sunday television show. His column runs Wednesdays in The Freeman.)