Brooks Pavilion at Alan Kulwicki Park
Well, that was uncomfortable.
Milwaukee County Parks Director John Dargle got an earful in yesterday’s meeting of the Parks, Energy and Environment Committee for his lack of transparency about an in-the-works lease with Greenfield for Kulwicki Park.
The lease, which I wrote about exclusively two weeks ago, came as a complete surprise for most of the supervisors—including Gerry Broderick, chair of the parks committee.
Yet the area’s supervisor, Tony Staskunas, members of the Parks Department, Milwaukee County Chris Abele and Greenfield elected officials were well aware of it.
That’s a problem.
And that’s why Dargle was forced to apologize a few times during the meeting.
“I apologize to the chairman in this matter,” Dargle said. “It wasn’t my intent to hold anything back but to get to a point where I had enough information to bring to this committee on not only this particular item but any other agreements we have out there at some point for your input.”
This lease has been in the works for some time and it seems to be pretty close to being finalized. It didn’t just pop up. In fact, discussions about the lease go back to the Sue Black era, according to my interview with Greenfield Mayor John Neitzke.
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Dargle and his aide, as well as Abele’s mouthpiece Brendan Conway, have been trying to spin the deal as being completely in line with other arrangements the county has with various municipalities.
But under questioning by Broderick yesterday, the administration was forced to admit that the most recent least was in the 1990s—ages ago.
“You can understand why I might view this as a divergence from contemporary policy,” Broderick said.
Supervisors’ reactions to the proposed lease were mixed. Staskunas is on board, saying there’s no harm in leasing the park to another public entity for the public good. He said the county needed to have a tough talk about how it was going to support the parks. Wishing that the 2008 sales tax referendum had been implemented wasn’t going to preserve the county’s “emerald necklace,” he said.
“We need to find a new way forward if we’re going to maintain the emerald part of the necklace,” Staskunas said. “We just cannot do business as we did 20 years ago.”
Others were much more critical of the deal. Broderick, of course, is upset about breaking up the county’s parks system and sees this deal as a way to starve the county parks—cannibalize them—until they’re spun off and gone forever. He predicted that the GOP-run state Legislature would create a parks district to try to save the parks system by destroying it.
Supervisor Jason Haas said he was most concerned about the “atomization of county assets.”
“This should be discussed at a larger level,” Haas said. “I think this is the wrong way to go to pick off our parks as stated before. We need to take it up to a higher level, by a larger body, perhaps—I may be going out on a limb here—a larger body called Milwaukee County.”
Supervisor Steve Taylor was more supportive of the deal, saying that with the $246 million in deferred maintenance, the county needed to strike these types of deals more often.
That said, he took a shot at Dargle.
“You’ve been here a year now,” Taylor said. “You know that we don’t like being surprised. You know that we don’t like reading things in the paper. The ‘I’m sorries’ are wearing out… If you’re going to make some type of policy change, you’ve got to communicate with everybody involved so we don’t have to hear ‘I wasn’t informed.’”
He then asked about the finances of the deal. If Greenfield was going to take over the park, then did it allocate money to operate it next year? After all, the municipality’s 2015 is signed; did Greenfield set aside money for the park?
Dargle and his aides didn’t know.
But eventually word came that yes, indeed, Greenfield had earmarked $24,000 in its next budget to operate Kulwicki Park.
“They’ve already budgeted something that we as a parks committee know nothing about until I put it on the agenda after a citizen calls me,” Broderick said. “There’s an interesting public process that really does bear scrutiny."
So, obviously, Greenfield knew the score all along, while the county board had no clue. (Well, most of the board.) That didn’t go over well.
Judging by the supervisors’ reactions, I would say that Dargle should definitely notify them before drafting any sort of lease for a park.
