Last week, Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele won the ability to sell off county-owned property without a public hearing or a vote by the county board.
Abele was granted those powers via a last-minute addition to the state budget approved by Republican leadership, including River Hills Sen. Alberta Darling, the co-chair of the budget-writing Joint Finance Committee (JFC), with no input from the public on the night before the Fourth of July holiday weekend. The JFC amendment greatly expanded Abele’s power, but it was narrowed down by both houses of the state Legislature and signed by Gov. Scott Walker.
Still, Abele has acquired extraordinary new powers that no other county executive in the state possesses. According to the legislation, Abele can now acquire, sell and control all county property except for county parks—that includes the O’Donnell Park site on the lakefront, currently being assessed by the Milwaukee Art Museum for possible purchase or lease—without a vote by the board of supervisors. Instead, Abele must obtain the signature of the county comptroller or an individual from the municipality where the land is located who is appointed by the executive council of the Intergovernmental Cooperation Council and is experienced in real estate but is not an elected official, according to a memo from County Corporation Counsel Paul Bargren.
The proceeds from the sales would go toward paying down the county’s debt.
Bargren told the Shepherd that the legislation allows Abele and his one ally to sell off county-owned properties including non-park land, buildings, foreclosed homes and other assets. No public hearing or announcement is required other than having Abele and his ally agree that the sale is in the county’s “best interests,” which the legislation doesn’t define.
“That could be read as having a public notice or an announcement or other provisions that would be in the best interests of the county,” Bargren said.
Bargren said the legislation doesn’t require Abele to solicit competitive, public bids for the properties. Abele has a history of agreeing to sole-source contracts to purchase county assets. Last year, he accepted Northwestern Mutual’s bid to purchase O’Donnell Park without a bidding process and the Barrett Visionary Development proposal to build the Couture on the Transit Center site was the result of a vague “requests for interest” process, not a full-fledged request for proposal process.
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Supervisor Gerry Broderick, chair of the Parks, Energy and Environment Committee and a vocal critic of Abele, said the budget amendment is part of a pattern of suburban and outstate Republican legislators working with Abele to destroy representative government in Milwaukee County.
“What has been diminished by the special interests’ Legislature now controlling the state is representative government itself,” Broderick said. “We now find ourselves in a position of having all kinds of decisions being made regarding the use of tax dollars into which the public has no input.”
Private, No-Bid Sales in Abele’s Hands
There’s a laundry list of public assets that Abele apparently can sell off without board oversight if he decides to blow up county government.
Topping the list of assets could be the county-owned General Mitchell International Airport. The airport generates a profit for the county and lowers the property taxes in Milwaukee County. In 2008, as county executive, Walker tried to privatize the airport but was blocked by county supervisors. State legislators had tried to set up a public-private airport authority with an eye to selling it or bidding it out for a long-term lease. While those efforts failed, Walker apparently has given his protégé Abele the ability to sell or lease it merely by finding that transaction to be in the best interests of the county.
Not to be overlooked are the nine acres of Park East land that are being offered for $1 to a development group representing the majority owners of the Milwaukee Bucks. Whether Abele can sell it without board approval is unclear. The Milwaukee County board had been set to vote on the sale, but Broderick said that the just-signed Walker budget prevents the board from taking action on it.
But Supervisor Patricia Jursik, an attorney and chair of the Economic and Community Development Committee, said that since the offer is still pending before the board, Abele doesn’t have the right to interfere with a transaction that’s already underway.
“We already started the process,” Jursik said. “So my question is, is the Legislature even going to be able to dictate what happens with the Park East? They’ve already put the offer in and we’ve already started the process of review. There’s a good faith requirement in contracts. This is really questionable.”
Another lucrative site is the county-owned Behavioral Health Division campus in Wauwatosa. The privatized Milwaukee County Mental Health Board, made up of appointees who ultimately report to the Abele administration, is currently debating downsizing and privatizing its services. To hasten this transition, Abele could sell off the property with no public comment.
Also in the county’s portfolio, according to a 2013 analysis of county-owned properties by CB Richard Ellis, are the medical examiner’s office; the Community Correctional Center; the Courthouse; Safety Building; the Marcia Coggs Human Services Center; the Technology Innovation Center, a new business incubator on the county grounds; the Vel Phillips Juvenile Justice Center; and the City Campus on West Wells Street, which is under a sale option.
Abele also has a handful of beloved cultural assets that he can sell off in private. The county owns the Milwaukee Public Museum—the land, building and its collections, according to a report by the Public Policy Forum—as well as the buildings housing the Charles Allis and Villa Terrace art museums on the East Side. Abele has pushed for transferring the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts to the state-run Wisconsin Center District as part of the pending Bucks deal. According to Broderick, the building is valued at $77 million for insurance purposes. The pending deal wouldn’t compensate county taxpayers for the investments they’ve made in the building, but it would saddle them with the building’s debt.
Less clear-cut is Abele’s ability to sell off the Milwaukee County Zoo, or whether it would be considered to be park land and off limits, as well as the House of Correction in Franklin. Bargren said the county is required to have a correctional facility, but that doesn’t seem to preclude Abele from selling it to a private corrections company and then leasing it back. The status of the War Memorial and Milwaukee Art Museum are both unclear, according to officials who spoke to the Shepherd.
