Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele’s rather expensive re-election campaign has one recurring theme: Abele got rid of the insiders in county government and is now working for you, the voters. Abele’s pricey campaign aides can repeat that claim as much as they want, but it’s not true, no matter how many times they say it.
In fact, Abele’s record in office shows that he’s the opposite of his campaign’s main theme.
Chris Abele has become the county’s ultimate insider.
Since taking office in 2011, Abele, the son of a Boston billionaire, has consistently worked with suburban, conservative Republicans to undermine local control of our county government and consolidate that power in his executive suite. With the help of his Republican friends in the Legislature, Abele has essentially taken the power away from Milwaukee County voters and taxpayers to make local decisions. Policies and procedures that the Milwaukee County taxpayers had established over the years for their local government were reversed or totally eliminated by Republican legislators from small towns in northern Wisconsin on behalf of Abele. In a few short years, with the help of behind-the-scenes deal-making with conservative Republican legislators and feeding into the anti-Milwaukee sentiment among rural Republican lawmakers, Abele has transformed an open, fully democratic county government into one that’s almost totally closed off from the public and in which, in many cases, the Milwaukee County taxpayers have no say.
Even worse, like Abele’s mentor, Gov. Scott Walker, Abele has never campaigned on the radical “reforms” he’s pushed behind closed doors with his fellow insiders. These insiders include state Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills), state Rep. Joe Sanfelippo (R-West Allis), state Rep. Dale Kooyenga (R-Brookfield), the conservative business group Greater Milwaukee Committee (GMC), conservative businessman Sheldon Lubar, and assorted real estate developers seeking county property for cheap.
So how did Abele became the ultimate Milwaukee County insider and how has he used that insider status?
* Decimating the board and public oversight. In 2013, Abele, who’d co-chaired a task force set up by the conservative business group Greater Milwaukee Committee (GMC), consolidated his power as Milwaukee County executive through Act 14, GMC-sponsored legislation to cut the power of the democratically elected Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors and give it to the county executive. Abele’s allies in this power-grab were allegedly the conservative members of the GMC, including his mentor, Sheldon Lubar, as well as Republican state legislators Darling and Sanfelippo. Abele, in turn, has donated $1,000 to Sanfelippo since 2012, the maximum he can give in two election cycles.
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* Near-unilateral power over land sales. This summer Abele sought near-unilateral powers over Milwaukee County government. The original proposal, which Darling slipped into a catch-all budget amendment, would have allowed Abele to do pretty much anything he wanted without facing a veto or check by the board. The budget amendment passed the Darling-chaired Joint Finance Committee, but legislators whittled it down to “merely” allowing Abele to sell off county land—as long as it isn’t parkland—without a public bid and with only the signature of one other individual. Now, Abele can sell off vital county assets including the zoo, the airport, the behavioral health complex, the Milwaukee Public Museum—to one of his cronies in secret.
* Abele’s personal school district. This summer, Abele again worked with suburban tea party legislators to launch the Opportunity Schools and Partnership Program (OSPP), which allows Abele, who lacks a college degree, to appoint a commissioner who can take over and privatize Milwaukee public schools. The plan, devised by Republican legislators Kooyenga and Darling, was slipped into the state budget with no public hearing in Milwaukee. (Abele has donated $1,000 to Kooyenga, the maximum allowed.) Abele didn’t campaign on the issue, so voters had no way to know that he would become the only county executive in the state with his own school district. But Abele, with Sanfelippo, sat silent as conservative businessman Sheldon Lubar told a UW-Milwaukee audience in May 2014 that after his victory in gutting the county board, his next target would be the democratically elected Milwaukee Public Schools board. Abele’s new OSPP has the potential to make good on Lubar’s demands.
* Taking over mental health services. In 2014, Abele worked with Sanfelippo and state Sen. Leah Vukmir (R-Wauwatosa) to push through Act 203, which launched the all-appointee Milwaukee County Mental Health Board, which now oversees all of Milwaukee County’s mental health and substance abuse services. These operations had been overseen by the locally elected county board. Since the Mental Health Board’s launch, Abele’s administration has heavily dominated the board’s actions, even though the board is supposed to be an independent check on the administration’s activities. The Mental Health Board has been criticized for lacking transparency, not reaching out to the public and not having the power to stand up to Abele’s appointees.
* Sweetheart land deals. In 2012, the Abele administration let out a little-used “request for interest” bidding process for developing one of the county’s most valuable pieces of land: the Transit Center site overlooking Lake Michigan. There was not a request for a complete proposal; this was just a request for a concept. Among those professionals nationally who develop requests for proposals for public entities, this process of a “request for interest” is essentially opening the door to sweetheart deals and corruption. The winner, chosen by Abele insiders behind closed doors, was developer Rick Barrett’s upscale Couture project. Barrett’s Couture project may very well have been the best of the bunch if a legitimate request for proposals had been utilized, but the process Abele used to select it was highly unusual. Barrett ultimately bought this highly valuable, 2.2-acre site from the county for $500,000. Now, Abele owns two condos in Barrett’s Moderne, totaling $2.8 million.
Abele has similarly disregarded normal, public bidding processes in land deals by accepting Northwestern Mutual Life’s low-ball offer to purchase the O’Donnell Park site (the board rejected it); cutting the board out of the sale of the Park East parcel for $1 to the majority Bucks owners; and allowing his appointed Health and Human Services Director Hector Colon to state publicly that he wanted to seek a no-bid contract to privatize the county’s psychiatric hospital, opening the door to corruption.
* Giving the Bucks more than what they wanted. Abele is taking credit for keeping the Milwaukee Bucks in town. But the Bucks were never seriously going to pack up and leave, and Abele’s behind-closed-doors “negotiating skills” cost Milwaukee County taxpayers $80 million over the next 20 years and has been highly praised by Republican legislative leaders because Abele’s deal got them off the hook. Gov. Walker wanted to have the state bond for the public portion of the Bucks arena, since the majority of the people going to see the Bucks live outside of Milwaukee County. Abele worked to shift a substantial portion of the tax burden for the arena from all of the state’s taxpayers to just Milwaukee County taxpayers. Abele also has courtside season tickets for the Bucks.
So Mr. Abele, how do you define an insider?
