You’d be hard-pressed to find a street quieter than West Uncas Avenue on Milwaukee’s far South Side. The cul-de-sac boasts little traffic, well-tended homes, wooded home sites and a park for neighborhood kids that’s at odds with the bustling airport neighborhood and commercial district that surrounds it.
But sleepy Uncas Avenue is now the center of a swirling controversy surrounding the construction of an eight-bedroom community-based residential facility with a 16-car parking lot and the placement of long-hospitalized mentally ill individuals, some of whom allegedly are sex offenders, in that facility.
The Uncas Avenue facility represents a perfect storm of a power-hungry county executive, his appointed Mental Health Board making decisions based on incomplete information, misinformation spread by county administrators and a vendor who won a $5.5 million contract in a private process that for all intents and purposes didn’t require a public bid. The result is a residential facility that could house sex offenders that neighbors—and the public at large—had no say in and very little solid information about.
Three elected officials who represent Uncas Avenue—state Rep. Christine Sinicki (D-Milwaukee), County Supervisor Jason Haas and Alderman Terry Witkowski—say Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele’s administration didn’t properly inform them that sex offenders would live in the Uncas Avenue facility, which, when it begins accepting residents, will be unlocked but staffed around the clock.
And notes from a neighborhood meeting about the facility obtained by the Shepherd show that the vendor who built and owns the facility, Matt Talbot Recovery Services Inc., assured Uncas Avenue residents that no sex offenders would live there.
According to one email exchange from Karl Rajani, president of Matt Talbot, to a representative from the neighborhood advisory group, Rajani wrote, “I am confident that the county does not intend the facility to be used for temporary or permanent housing of sex offenders. As I noted yesterday, a resident may have proclivities for sexually inappropriate behavior.”
In the same email Rajani also offered to pay residents $100 per meeting they attend—$150 for the chair of the neighborhood advisory committee—but all residents turned down his offer, the Shepherd was told.
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Rajani’s assurances proved to be untrue soon thereafter, when those elected officials and neighbors found out that two sex offenders would live in the new Uncas Avenue facility and that there was nothing they could do about it.
Witkowski said he heard from neighbors that sex offenders would be placed on Uncas Avenue and that he contacted Abele for more information. He said he didn’t get a solid response from the county until after he called a press conference in November.
“This is the worst example of government I’ve ever seen as far as secrecy and not involving the public,” Witkowski told the Shepherd.
Supervisor Haas, who represents the area on the county board, said he found out about the facility after the fact and the board doesn’t have the ability to vote on it.
“This was done utterly in secret,” Haas said.
Abele’s spokeswoman said the county executive wouldn’t respond to questions on the matter, citing patient confidentiality laws. Nor did the Shepherd get a response from Karl Rajani, whose company secured a $5.5 million, 3-year contract to oversee the residents on Uncas Avenue and in Franklin.
Héctor Colón, Abele’s director of Health and Human Services, told the Shepherd on Monday that all local, state and federal laws were followed when awarding the contract to Matt Talbot and planning the transition of the residents into the community.
He wouldn’t confirm that sex offenders would be among the residents on Uncas Avenue.
“I’m not at liberty to talk specifically with regard to our clients,” Colón said, citing patient confidentiality laws. “What I have said is that all federal, state and local laws have been followed with regards to these transitions. And there’s been a comprehensive process in place, structured through a state process to ensure that each and every individual had adequate plans to ensure the safety and protection of the individual and also the community.”
Downsizing the Mental Health Hospital
The Uncas Avenue facility boiled over in two Milwaukee County Board committees last week, even though supervisors no longer have oversight of mental health services or the Uncas Avenue facility. Supervisors lost that authority in mid-2014, when Abele-backed state legislation created the all-appointee Milwaukee County Mental Health Board.
The Mental Health Board—which rarely allows public testimony during its meetings and never faces Milwaukee County voters on Election Day—now oversees the county’s Behavioral Health Division (BHD) at a critical time for the county. Abele’s administration is pushing hard to downsize the county’s mental health hospital and place more patients within the community, for example in community-based residential facilities like the one built on Uncas Avenue.
In addition, Abele’s administration is seeking to privatize the psychiatric hospital. A competitive request for proposals (RFP) issued this summer attracted no appropriate bids, county officials said, so it was scuttled in October. As the Shepherd reported that month, Colón said he wanted to privatize the hospital via a no-bid, single-source contract with a national entity, a closed-door contracting process that opens the door to corruption.
As the Shepherd exclusively reported, the Mental Health Board pushed back on Colón’s plans later in October and has set up two task forces to look into privatization, one to study a national single-source vendor and a second task force to look into a public-private partnership with the county and local mental health service providers.
However, last week the administrator in charge of the hospital, Patricia Schroeder, announced her resignation effective Jan. 31, 2016.
Schroeder, along with Colón and Abele, were among the county officials who signed the contract with Matt Talbot in late October and early November.
A Competitive Process?
At the same time the county is trying to privatize its psychiatric hospital, the county is closing the long-term care units within it and all patients are scheduled to be transitioned into the community by the end of the year. Colón said on Monday that four long-term patients remain in the hospital and they’ll be transitioned to the Uncas Avenue facility.
As of January 2014, when the county apparently began looking for vendors to provide homes for these patients, it provided data about 24 residents in long-term care. A handful of them had been hospitalized for a year, but the average length of stay was eight years, according to county data. One patient had been in the county’s care for 20 years and three had been there for 18 years.
The Mental Health Board signed off on the Matt Talbot contract in June 2015, but records from that hearing and its audio reveal that members had little information about the contract and what they did learn is subject to question.
Prior to the meeting, Colón sent a one and a half-page memo to the board outlining the services to be provided by Matt Talbot with a request to sign off on the $5.5 million, 3-year contract.
When a Mental Health Board member asked if the contract had been awarded via a competitive RFP process, a BHD employee, Amy Lorenz, said she didn’t know because a previous employee had handled it. Then a representative from Matt Talbot—believed to be Rajani, but the speaker doesn’t identify himself and the meeting minutes don’t include his identity, either—testified that the contract-awarding process had been “highly competitive” and required multiple presentations before the BHD official. He fell short of saying that the company won the contract through a competitive RFP process.
Nobody mentioned the possibility that the facility would house sex offenders and no public testimony was allowed.
The board unanimously signed off on the $5.5 million contract for facilities on Uncas Avenue and in Franklin.
On Monday, Colón told the Shepherd that the Abele administration did not, in fact, seek competitive bids on the residential facilities. Instead, in January 2014, just before Abele pushed the legislation that stripped the county board of mental health services oversight, the county released a “request for information” (RFI) for residential facilities transitioning from the hospital’s long-term care units.
The RFI seems to be written to gather information about how the county could transition these residents, and notes that “BHD anticipates that RFPs for more specific community-based mental health services may be issued.” It drew three responses.
But Colón confirmed on Monday to the Shepherd that the administration never lets out a competitive RFP for community-based residential facilities, such as the one on Uncas Avenue, because the vendors in question already contract with the county.
“We don’t do RFPs with them because they’re already in the community with us and have contracts with us and we transition clients to them based on the level of care a particular person may need,” Colón told the Shepherd.
He said the RFI “was kind of an extension to our network of providers.”
Colón said four individuals would be transitioned to Uncas Avenue, the final residents in the long-term care units.
No Public Input
But that’s not the only way that the Uncas Avenue facility escaped scrutiny. According to Alderman Witkowski, community-based residential facilities that top out at eight bedrooms don’t go before the city’s zoning committee or the Common Council. Nor can he or any other elected official stop it unless they want a lawsuit on their hands, he was told.
As of this writing, the facility has an occupancy permit from the city but it doesn’t yet have a license from the state and the hospital’s patients haven’t been transitioned there. State Rep. Sinicki and state Sen. Chris Larson (D-Milwaukee) sent a letter to state Secretary of Health Services Kitty Rhoades on Dec. 7 asking the state to delay the licensing of the Uncas Avenue facility. The legislators wrote that City of Milwaukee ordinances may not allow sex offenders to be housed in a community-based residential facility. They also note Matt Talbot’s assurances in a public meeting that no sex offenders would be housed there.
“The City of Milwaukee has raised a dispute over this issue with Milwaukee County,” Sinicki and Larson wrote to Rhoades. “We would ask that the state delay the licensing of this CBRF facility until the issue between the local governmental bodies is resolved.”
Last week, county supervisors attempted to shed some light on the facility when they held two committee hearings on the matter and allowed public testimony. Those who testified from the neighborhood generally agreed that they didn’t object to allowing those with mental illnesses or disabilities to live on Uncas Avenue, but that they were upset that they were assured that no sex offenders would live in there.
Colleen Foley, from the county’s corporation counsel office, said that no child sex offenders or violent sex offenders would be placed there. She said none of the residents would fall under the city’s sex offender ordinance.
Supervisor Marina Dimitrijevic requested that a record of last Wednesday’s Health and Human Needs Committee be sent to the Mental Health Board and asked that the members of that board allow public testimony at its Thursday, Dec. 17, meeting.
The Matt Talbot contract is on the Dec. 17 Mental Health Board agenda, but Mental Health Board Chair Kimberly Walker emailed the Shepherd Monday night that “the meeting will not include public comment.” Thus, the Uncas Avenue neighbors will likely be shut out of the debate yet again.
The Mental Health Board is scheduled to meet at 8 a.m. at the auditorium in the Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex, 9201 W. Watertown Plank Road.
