AFSCME rep Dennis Hughes was arrested at this morning’s meeting of the Milwaukee County Mental Health Board.
Hughes was physically forced out of the room and pulled to the floor in the hallway, where security had him face down and were handcuffing him. That’s when the doors closed on me and I couldn’t see what else was happening.
It was atrocious.
No peaceful person should be physically ousted from a public hearing simply for attempting to speak.
“There’s an imminent threat to public safety” posed by the planned release of two long-term residents of the psychiatric hospital, Hughes was trying to tell the Mental Health Board. He tried to tell them more but security closed in on him.
Hughes was pulled out of the room while Mental Health Board Chair Kimberly Walker shouted him down, telling him he was out of order.
The hospital’s administrator, Patricia Schroeder, just sat at the board table, looking shaken but staying utterly silent.
The Journal Sentinel has something up about the arrest but as per usual the story is pretty much wrong.
The salient point is not that Hughes is a union rep, as the JS’s Don Behm would have you believe. Nor is it about the union’s certification.
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Rather, the real issue is about the Mental Health Board’s refusal to hear from the public during its meetings, as I’ve detailed extensively for the past few months.
The appointed Mental Health Board, unlike the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors, doesn’t function as a truly public entity. It was created via state legislation in 2014 and members are appointed by Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele and Gov. Scott Walker and they don’t have to go before the voters.
By law, it only has to allow public testimony at one meeting a year, on the budget. The Mental Health Board has allowed some testimony here and there but it’s rare.
Instead of hearing from the public, the Mental Health Board gets almost 100% of its information from the very people it’s supposed to be governing—the Behavioral Health Division administration, including Health and Human Services Director Hector Colon and outgoing hospital administrator Schroeder, who announced her January 2016 resignation last week.
So that’s the context in which the Mental Health Board operates.
The specific issue at hand is the Mental Health Board’s refusal to hear from the public about the new community facility located at West Uncas Avenue on Milwaukee’s far south side.
The board approved the $5.5 million contract for that facility and another one in Franklin based on very spotty information, as I detailed in this week’s Shepherd. If you ask me, the Mental Health Board was played by BHD administration and the vendor. BHD and the vendor made it seem as if the contract had been awarded based on a “very competitive” process. But there was no bidding process, as I exclusively reported this week.
So that’s one issue.
The other is who, exactly, will live on Uncas Avenue. Again, as I documented this week, neighbors were assured that there would be no sex offenders in the facility. Then they found out in November that there would be two sex offenders in this staffed but unlocked facility.
Naturally, the neighbors and local elected officials got upset because the BHD administration had assured them that the Uncas Avenue facility wouldn’t house sex offenders.
So, last week, the Milwaukee County board—not the appointed Mental Health Board—held two hearings on the Uncas Avenue facility, just to get information out there and allow the public to speak out. No Mental Health Board members were in attendance, apparently, so Supervisor Marina Dimitrijevic requested that the committee meeting’s minutes be sent to the Mental Health Board and requested that the Mental Health Board allow the public to speak on the matter at its Dec. 17 meeting.
Board Chair Walker responded to my request about public testimony saying that it wouldn’t be allowed at the Dec. 17 meeting.
Which brings us to this morning. The meeting started at 8 a.m. sharp.
The Uncas Avenue facility was the last item on the agenda.
But Board Member Duncan Shrout moved that it be heard first. So even if Uncas Avenue residents had been allowed to speak, they would have been caught off guard and likely wouldn’t have been there to speak at 8 a.m.
The discussion was relatively superficial, which I’m sure was by design. Colon assured the board that all state, local and federal laws had been followed.
Board Chair Walker never told the board that Supervisor Dimitrijevic had made her request for public discussion. Nor did any board members bring up the fact that BHD administration had misled them on the $5.5 million contract. Nor did they discuss Uncas Avenue neighbors’ concerns about sex offenders living on their block.
So the board voted to table the issue.
And that’s when Hughes stood up, demanding to speak about the “imminent threat to public safety.”
And that’s when security moved in on him.
So that’s the true story of what happened this morning.
Quite frankly, Abele, Colon, Schroeder and the Mental Health Board are continuing to cover up the Uncas Avenue mess because they don’t want the public to know how this all came about.
(And don’t bother reading the Journal Sentinel’s coverage on this issue. As you now know, you're not getting the full story!)
