Wisconsin cities want presidential candidates to pay for pricey campaign stops

Editor’s note: This story was reported and written before the July 13 shooting at a rally for former President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, which is being investigated as an assassination attempt.

With President Joe Biden and Donald Trump again eying Wisconsin as a crucial presidential election battleground, some cash-strapped municipalities hope their campaigns will pick up the tab for their expensive visits to the state.

Those include the cities of Green Bay and Eau Claire, where officials said they still haven’t been reimbursed for tens of thousands of dollars in costs related to public safety and operational support during campaign visits dating back to 2016. 

On a snowy Tuesday evening in April, Trump made his first visit in four years to Green Bay, delivering a roughly one-hour speech to hundreds of supporters gathered downtown at the KI Convention Center.

The city’s costs for the rally totaled nearly $33,400, officials said in a July 2 press release. The costs stemmed from operational, security and traffic coordination services — the biggest chunk coming in police overtime —  and preparing for the risks of welcoming a high-profile candidate, said Diana Ellenbecker, the city’s finance director. 

Trump’s arrival at 5 p.m. on a workday “created much more overtime and much more coordination for the bigger crowd,” Ellenbecker said. “There’s just hours and hours and hours involved administratively, besides all the operational needs, to make it a safe event.”

Trump campaign not willing to pay bills

The April rally was the most expensive presidential campaign event Green Bay has hosted without being reimbursed since 2016. Trump’s campaign has refused to reimburse the city for those costs or for nearly $9,400 in police expenses related to an August 2016 rally, city records show. 

“When we reached out to the Trump camp, they sent an email that they’re not responsible for paying this bill,” Ellenbecker said. 

Without reimbursement, the extra rally costs eat into the department reserve funds. 

“It does have an impact,” Ellenbecker said. “It makes departments look like they’re overspending their budgets because they’re incurring expenses that they didn’t have a revenue source for.” 

President Biden has not visited Green Bay this year, but first lady Jill Biden visited the Brown County Public Library in June to promote the president’s health care policies, prompting the city to invoice the Democrat’s campaign nearly $7,000 for police, fire, parking and related costs for an event that was smaller and easier to support than Trump’s rally. The city received a payment from Biden’s campaign days after its July press release listed the invoice as unpaid, and Ellenbecker called the campaign “proactive” in handling it. 

“We pay our bills, and Trump doesn’t,” Eliana Locke, regional spokesperson for the Biden campaign, told Wisconsin Watch. “He’s continued to stiff working people, and that includes places like Green Bay.”

Trump’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment, but it has previously denied responsibility for such costs. 

“It is the U.S. Secret Service, not the campaign, which coordinates with local law enforcement,” the Trump campaign told The Center for Public Integrity in April 2020, responding to the news outlet’s findings that the campaign refused to pay invoices from 14 local governments totaling $1.82 million. “The campaign itself does not contract with local governments for police involvement. All billing inquiries should go to the Secret Service.” 

At the Trump campaign’s suggestion, Green Bay shared its April invoice with the Secret Service, Ellenbecker said, only to be told “that’s not our responsibility to pay this bill.”

Green Bay officials said the campaigns of two Democrats still owe the city for costs stemming from events in 2016: Hillary Clinton (about $12,500) and Bernie Sanders (nearly $2,000). 

“Green Bay residents are frugal people who pay their bills, and they expect presidential candidates to do the same,” Mayor Eric Genrich said in the city’s press release. “It is a matter of fairness and fiscal responsibility — our residents should not bear the burden of these expenses.”

Oshkosh city manager: ‘Campaigns ignore municipalities’  

Green Bay isn’t the only city feeling stiffed by past presidential campaigns.   

Officials in Eau Claire, which hosted Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, said the city is still owed nearly $47,000 and $7,000 from each visit respectively. 

“We have not been paid, and we do not expect to be paid, and there’s no recourse for us to be paid from them,” Regi Akan, who works in the office of City Manager Stephanie Hirsch, told Wisconsin Watch. 

The city of Oshkosh incurred costs related to a 2020 Trump rally and a campaign visit from Chelsea Clinton in 2016, but the city hasn’t aggressively sought reimbursement due to historic challenges in doing so, said City Manager Mark Rohloff in an interview.

Rohloff, who worked decades ago in California local government, said the problem isn’t new. He recalls trying to bill former President Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign to no avail.   

“Campaigns ignore municipalities, thinking that they should be happy that a presidential candidate chooses to come and visit their town,” Rohloff said. “Unless the campaigns are going to publicly commit and be held accountable for paying or not paying their bills, it’s going to be very difficult.”

Trump’s campaign did reimburse at least one Wisconsin city for a campaign stop. In a document acquired by Business Insider in 2020, Trump’s campaign treasurer at the time approved a $5,574 payment to the city of La Crosse for costs related to a September 2020 rally. The payment arrived several weeks late, and it was also 10 cents short of the invoice’s requested amount, Business Insider reported. The Trump campaign at the time, however, had not paid the city for a 2016 event. 

Past proposal would allow upfront invoicing 

Responding to complaints about unpaid invoices, Democrats in the Legislature have previously proposed legislation to allow local governments to require advance payments from visiting presidential or vice presidential candidates.

The “Recovery of Unsettled Municipal Payments Act” failed to advance after being introduced in the 2019-2020 and 2023-2024 legislative sessions.

“Before President Trump or any of the other presidential campaigns come to Wisconsin, they should pay their bills if they expect to hold events for voters,” said the bill’s most recent co-sponsorship memo, authored by Sens. Jeff Smith of Brunswick and Chris Larson of Milwaukee, along with Reps. Kristina Shelton of Green Bay and Jodi Emerson of Eau Claire.

Such legislation is a “nice gesture,” Rohloff said, but enforcement would prove difficult because municipalities can’t reasonably deny services aimed at protecting the public.

“We have to assist our federal and state law enforcement partners to ensure public safety,” Rohloff said.  “So we’re kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place because we’re not going to say no, and (campaigns) know it.” 

Shouldering extra costs of campaign visits is necessary, regardless of whether campaigns chip in, said Dylan Brogan, spokesperson for the city of Madison. Madison, the site of a rally for President Biden on July 5, follows a long-standing practice of not billing campaigns for visits, regardless of party.  It does not plan to invoice Biden’s campaign. 

The only exception to this practice, Brogan said, was a 2019 visit from Sanders during his presidential campaign run. His campaign “specifically asked the city for an invoice so he could pay them back, and his campaign did,” Brogan said.

But gestures like Sanders’ are rare, Brogan said.

“There’s only so much the city can do except to be welcoming and making sure that everyone is safe.”

This article first appeared on Wisconsin Watch and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.