Author: Adam Stoffel

Key Takeaways:

• Assessors began fieldwork this month to conduct a village-wide property revaluation. This is Whitefish Bay’s first physical revaluation since 2019.
• New values hit the December 2027 tax bill, not this next one.
• A revaluation/assessment doesn’t raise the tax levy; it changes how the levy is divided. With assessments running at 88% of market, expect most values to rise — what matters is whether yours rises faster than your neighbors’.

If you read the insert that came folded into your December tax bill last year, you saw a small blue box near the bottom of page two announcing that Associated Appraisal Consultants took over as the Village’s assessor on January 1, 2026.

It read like housekeeping, though it really wasn’t. This month, field staff from that firm began walking Whitefish Bay properties with tape measures and cameras — the first physical inspection of the village’s housing stock since 2019. The 2024 revaluation was done using a “computer assisted appraisal system”, as the prior contract states. 

The Village posted a revaluation FAQ explaining the work, and I’d encourage Villagers to read it. Also, the Village’s prior assessor is currently defending a negligence lawsuit from another Milwaukee County municipality alleging it didn’t properly check property records.

Here’s the whole picture: what’s happening, why it’s happening now, and what it will and won’t do to your tax bill.

First, what an assessment actually is

A property assessment is not an appraisal in the sense most homeowners may know the word. When you purchase or refinance your house, a licensed appraiser typically spends time inside your house and writes a report about your house specifically. A municipal assessor does mass appraisal: modeling thousands of properties at once using sales data, square footage, lot size, age, condition, and location, then applying that model more or less across the whole community.

The goal isn’t to nail your individual home to the dollar. The goal is relative accuracy — making sure your house and a neighbor’s house three doors down carry proportional shares of the tax burden. Wisconsin law requires assessments be based on fair market value, and values are set as of January 1 each year.

There are two flavors of the work, and Whitefish Bay signed contracts for both:

Annual maintenance is the routine year workup. The assessor picks up new construction, additions, demolitions, teardowns, and properties that changed significantly, while more or less leaving others alone — this is what we’ll get for this coming tax year.

Revaluation reviews every taxable property in the community to reset values to the current market. Under state law, a municipality has to bring all major classes of property within 10% of full value in the same year at least once every five years. Note that this does not mean it’s done every five years, but must be done at least once every five. Miss that window long enough and the Department of Revenue steps in and orders one, on its schedule and at the municipality’s expense.

According to the contract with Associated Appraisal Consultants, Whitefish Bay is getting an exterior revaluation for the December 2027 tax bill that puts a person on the sidewalk to inspect and photograph the outside of every improved property.

Why now

Whitefish Bay’s 2026 assessment level is about 88% of market value, which the Village acknowledges puts it outside the range state law requires. Assessed values here have drifted meaningfully below what properties actually sell for, which is what happens when a hot market runs ahead of a valuation done in 2024.

In 2025, the Village Board decided to move to a two-year revaluation cycle as a deliberate response to what happened when the Village went five years between updates and residents opened notices showing significant increases in their home assessments. Smaller, more frequent adjustments are easier to absorb than one enormous one.

When the Village put out an RFP for appraisal services and selected Associated, the firm shared that it was willing to go one year (this year) without a full revaluation but not longer. A village official stated at a 2025 board meeting that Associated had concerns about the accuracy of the property data it was inheriting and wanted to verify it on the ground before building valuations on top of it. That was a condition of taking the work, and staff noted the firm had been upfront about it from the start.

The firm that had the job before

Whitefish Bay’s assessor through the end of 2025 was Accurate Appraisal, LLC, of Menasha. In February 2025, the City of Franklin sued the company in Milwaukee County Circuit Court.

The allegations, as reported by the Journal Sentinel, are worth reading carefully — because they describe the potential misses that the exterior inspection Whitefish Bay signed on for should be able to catch.

Franklin, which hired Accurate in 2022 for maintenance and revaluation work, alleges the firm skipped required field inspections, relied on old or unverified property data, failed to maintain measurements and sketches, and used trending factors on non-residential property without documenting the calculations. Homeowners had complained to the city that their assessments included features their houses didn’t have — a basement, in one example cited in the complaint. The suit further alleges that when owners complained, Accurate sometimes adjusted values with no supporting data or record, and that the firm wouldn’t produce the underlying documentation when the city asked for it. Franklin says it now faces substantial costs rebuilding property data it should have had all along. It named the company, its owner, its assessor, and the firm’s insurer, and asked for a jury trial.

Franklin ended the relationship and hired a different firm. Accurate Appraisal remains the contracted assessor in a substantial number of Wisconsin municipalities. 

It should be noted that these are allegations in pending litigation, not findings. Nothing in that lawsuit concerns Whitefish Bay directly. 

When this hits your tax bill

Fieldwork is happening now, in the back half of 2026. 

The new values land on the 2027 assessment, which will affect the tax bills mailed in December 2027 and will be paid beginning in early 2028.

One more distinction the Village would like to make, according to the FAQ page: the revaluation and the upcoming referendum are separate from each other. A revaluation changes how the tax burden is divided among properties. A referendum changes how much the school district is authorized to collect in the first place. If a referendum passes in November, that increase shows up on the December 2026 bills payable in 2027, a full year before the revaluation shows up.

What a revaluation does and doesn’t do

This is where people seem to frequently jump to inaccurate conclusions, so let’s be blunt: a revaluation does not raise the tax levy.

Assessments determine how the levy is divided, not how big it is. If every property in the Village doubled overnight and the levies stayed flat, the tax rate would simply be cut roughly in half and most bills would land in about the same place. What actually changes is your share. If your assessment rises more than the village-wide average, your share goes up. Less than average, your share goes down. Right at the average, you’re roughly where you started.

The Village’s FAQ looks to a pizza pie to explain this — a revaluation doesn’t make the pizza bigger, it changes how it’s sliced. It’s a good metaphor and I’ll allow it. The thing to notice is that somebody’s slice does get smaller and somebody’s does get bigger, and given that assessments here are running at 88% of market, expect most values to rise. Rising is not the same as rising faster than your neighbors, which is the comparison that touches your bill.

Top residential tax bills in WFB 

As an interesting tidbit, from the Village’s 2026 completed real estate assessment roll (all 713 pages!) I took a look at the highest assessed properties and noted their 2025 tax bills. Here’s how much the top five residential properties pay in annual taxes.

1. $104,521
2. $84,445
3. $67,457
4. $64,107
5. $59,804

You probably won’t be surprised that each of these five houses can be found along Lake Drive, but you’ll have to do the leg work to figure out the exact address, if interested. 

One additional item worth noting

While reviewing this year’s assessment roll, I noticed that the Village’s cited average home value of $685,800 is consistent with a mean, not a median. The median assessed value in Whitefish Bay works out to roughly $575,000, about $110,000 lower. If my calculations are correct, nearly two-thirds of the village’s 4,800+ residential parcels are currently assessed below $685,800.

One implication of this is that most homeowners would pay less than the widely cited $857 per year if the school referendum passes in November. That figure isn’t wrong, to be clear, but it would be just as accurate, and perhaps more reasonable, to say that half of all residential properties would pay more than about $719 a year and half would pay less, using the district’s own assumptions, should the referendum pass.

Flock Safety cameras have been in the news a lot lately — nationally, statewide, and here in Milwaukee County. With that attention has come a fair number of questions from readers about whether Whitefish Bay uses them. The short answer is yes, and has since early 2023.

Here’s what we found.

What is Flock and why is the technology drawing attention?

Flock Safety is an Atlanta-based company founded in 2017 that sells automated license plate reader systems, usually shortened to ALPR. It began by selling to homeowners associations and moved into contracts with governments and police departments in 2020. It now operates roughly 120,000 cameras nationwide and contracts with about 7,000 law enforcement agencies — around 40 percent of departments in the country. An ALPR is a fixed camera, often solar-powered and mounted along a roadway, that photographs every passing vehicle and reads the plate out of the image. According to Flock’s website, its cameras also log make, model, color and identifying details. Each sighting is time-stamped and location-stamped and feeds into a searchable database, so an officer can enter a plate number or vehicle description and see where and when that vehicle was photographed. The system also sends automatic alerts when a camera spots a plate on a “hot list,” such as the FBI’s database of stolen vehicles. 

Two features generate the most discussion. First, retention: Flock’s default had been 30 days, though departments could adjust it. On August 13th, amid national backlash, Flock announced it was cutting its recommended default to seven days, but existing customers keep their current retention periods unless they opt in. Second, sharing: if a department wants to search cameras outside its own network, it must in turn share access to its own. Most agencies search and share nationally according to the NY Times.

Locally, two Milwaukee police officers have been charged with abusing the system. Last month an MPD officer pleaded guilty to using the department’s Flock system to track an ex-girlfriend and her partner, the Journal Sentinel reported.  Urban Milwaukee reported in July that a second MPD officer (one of the internal affairs investigators on the first case) faces felony misconduct charges for similar misuse.

Supporters of the cameras make a straightforward case. Former Ozaukee County Sheriff Maury Straub argued in a Journal Sentinel op-ed in May that the technology captures plates on public roads rather than tracking individuals, and that documented misuse is an argument for stronger rules/policies rather than full removal. Flock now requires an audit tool that flags unusual search patterns and logs each search along with who ran it and why.

Critics focus less on individual misuse than on what a 120,000-camera network makes possible. Barry Friedman, an NYU law professor who directs the Policing Project, told the NY Times the practice amounts to “indiscriminate data collection, not targeting specific crimes.” The ACLU has raised similar objections, noting the absence of a warrant requirement and the fact that searches aren’t limited to serious crimes.

The North Shore picture

A crowdsourced website called DeFlock.org lets anyone log the location of an ALPR they spot on a pole. Zoom into the North Shore and the map shows reported cameras in Bayside, Brown Deer, Fox Point and Glendale, plus a few at the edges of Whitefish Bay. Shorewood and River Hills show none — and going back through public documents for both, the WFB Buzz could not find any budgeted dollars going to Flock Safety from those two communities. One caveat: the map is user-reported rather than official, so a blank spot means no one has logged a camera there, not necessarily that none exists. 

What Whitefish Bay has and what it costs

The Whitefish Bay Police Department confirmed to the WFB Buzz that the Village leases three Flock cameras. Those are located on Silver Spring at Lydell, on Oakland at Glendale Avenue, and a third on Hampton at Estabrook Park — the last of which actually sits within the City of Milwaukee rather than the Village (PD did not confirm the exact locations). The department signed a contract with Flock in late 2022 and the cameras were installed in early 2023. The initial contract covered three cameras for four years and was paid for through a grant from the Wisconsin Department of Administration, accounting for a $31,050 check recorded in the Village ledger in January 2023. That term expires toward the end of this year. The Village has since moved to a one-year agreement, with $7,500 budgeted for 2026.

Who can search the data

Flock’s system lets each department decide whether to share its data. The WFB Police Department told the WFB Buzz that any outside agency must request access to the Village’s camera data, and that the department can revoke it at any time. The reverse applies as well: Whitefish Bay must request access before searching another agency’s database.

How the department uses them

The Police Department told us that the cameras are a useful tool, citing their role in investigating retail thefts from local businesses, package thefts from residences, and motor vehicle thefts. The department has also used the system to locate people reported missing/endangered due to mental health issues, as well as one case of a missing person under the state’s Silver Alert program.

In 2024, after a pediatric wheelchair was taken from the curb outside a Whitefish Bay home, officers used Flock to identify the vehicle involved, locate it, and return the wheelchair to the child’s family. 

Stolen vehicles are one of the more measurable use cases. According to the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer, Whitefish Bay police reported 17 stolen vehicles in 2024 and 2025 combined — a figure the department confirmed. All 17 were recovered. Asked whether Flock played a role, the department said it could not attribute any specific recovery solely to the cameras, but described the system as an investigative tool used routinely that can and has helped narrow down where to look.

The damaged camera at Estabrook Park

In March, the Village-owned camera near Estabrook Park was damaged. Asked for an update on the investigation, the Police Department said it had none to provide.

The incident drew coverage from TMJ4 at the time, which reported it as part of a broader pattern of Flock cameras being vandalized in Milwaukee County and in several other states. The station’s story quoted a Whitefish Bay resident who said he hadn’t been aware the cameras were in the community, and who was frustrated that someone had chosen to deface the camera rather than discussing it with the Village in a reasonable manner.

A WFB Buzz visit on August 17th found the camera has been recently defaced again, this time with a sticker.

The Village’s original four-year term expires later this year, and the cameras will now come up for renewal annually. The Police Department shared that they were not aware of any resident raising the topic at any public meetings over the past few years.