Last week, the public found out just how far Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele’s administration will go to silence the public on the administration’s plans to place two long-term psychiatric hospital patients who are sex offenders in a new group home on Milwaukee’s far South Side.
At the public meeting of the appointed Milwaukee County Mental Health Board, Dennis Hughes spoke out about the “imminent threat to public safety” posed by two patients who apparently are scheduled to be transferred to a new facility on West Uncas Avenue by the end of the year.
Hughes, a field representative for AFSCME District Council 32, alleged that the patients have been telling hospital staff that they plan to reoffend with teenage boys when they are released. He also made allegations about former hospital patients who have been placed in group homes.
“No one has oversight over this,” Hughes said as security closed in on him. “No one even knows because you don’t care. Because this board is made up of Scott Walker appointees and Chris Abele appointees. And there’s nothing we can do about it.”
Once he started talking, Board Chair Kimberly Walker shouted him down and security marched him out of the room, pulled him to the floor in the hallway and handcuffed him while sitting on his back.
The Shepherd caught much of the event on video, up until county employees shut the door on this reporter and blocked some of Hughes’ arrest from view.
He was taken into custody and given a municipal citation and a January court date.
His alleged offense was speaking peacefully during a public meeting of a board tasked with overseeing all of Milwaukee County’s mental health services.
“Please be clear,” Kimberly Walker, who’d served as an Abele-appointed corporation counsel before county supervisors fired her in 2013, said after Hughes was removed from the meeting. “Today’s meeting is not a meeting for public comment.”
“We support and encourage diverse perspectives,” Health and Human Services Director Héctor Colón emailed the Shepherd on Monday. “People like the protester are welcome to voice their opinions when public comment is on the agenda and outside of these meetings, directly to [Behavioral Health Division] administration and members of the board. Clearly in this instance decorum was not followed and action needed to be taken to respect the board meeting process.”
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Appointees in Charge
Peaceful members of the public typically are not hauled out of public meetings and arrested, but when it comes to Abele’s Mental Health Board and the Uncas Avenue community facility, very little has been typical.
The Mental Health Board oversees all of the county’s mental health programs while the county is aggressively downsizing its Behavioral Health Complex on Watertown Plank Road and providing more resources within the community.
The plan is loosely overseen by the appointed Mental Health Board, which was launched via state legislation backed by Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele and authored by state Rep. Joe Sanfelippo (R-West Allis) in 2014 and has replaced the elected Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors on mental health and substance abuse services.
The Mental Health Board operates quite differently than the county board. Members are appointed volunteers with expertise in mental health. It sets its own budget, which the county board cannot change although Abele has the power to alter it. It has no dedicated staff, meaning it must rely on Abele’s people to provide information, research and services. Its meetings are not videotaped and its audio recordings are fuzzy. The full board meets roughly every two months and rarely allows the public to testify. Instead, it receives almost all of its information from the people it is charged with overseeing—the Behavioral Health Division (BHD) administration, led by Health and Human Services Director Colón. The hospital’s administrator, Patricia Schroeder, recently announced her resignation effective Jan. 31, 2016.
Part of the county’s downsizing plan is to close the long-term care units in its psychiatric hospital and transition these patients into the community—for example, in a group home with professional staff. The final patients are scheduled to be transitioned by the end of the year and the administration is seeking to privatize the hospital by 2018. According to many mental health care experts, there are benefits to transitioning some individuals to community settings, but for others, it potentially is dangerous to both the individuals, who have more severe mental illness, and in some instances to the community in general.
Four of the remaining patients apparently are supposed to live in a new facility on Uncas Avenue, a quiet cul-de-sac near the airport with a park and little traffic.
As the Shepherd detailed last week, the Mental Health Board had little solid information about the Uncas Avenue facility. In June it approved a three-year contract worth up to $5.5 million to Matt Talbot Recovery Services Inc. for providing care for up to 10 patients from the county’s long-term care in two community facilities, one on South 92nd Street in Franklin and the other on Uncas Avenue in Milwaukee.
In the June meeting approving the contract, BHD officials couldn’t state if the contract had been awarded via a competitive request for proposals (RFP) process, but a representative from Matt Talbot said the company had gone through a “very competitive process” to win the contract.
But as the Shepherd revealed last week, Abele’s appointee, Héctor Colón, admitted that the contract wasn’t awarded via a competitive bid. These sweetheart contracts that aren’t bid competitively often end up costing more for inferior services. This is why every honest government in the world uses a competitive bidding process when it looks to contract for outside services.
Neighbors Are Silenced
According to the legislation that created the Mental Health Board, it must only allow public testimony during one meeting per year. The board has allowed some public testimony this year but it’s rare.
No members of the public were allowed to speak about the group home contract during the board meeting in June.
Later, residents of the Uncas Avenue neighborhood said that they discovered that despite the assurances of the group home’s owner that there would be no sex offenders in the facility, two long-term patients from the mental health hospital who are registered sex offenders would be placed in the unlocked but staffed facility.
Local elected officials were shocked and outraged as well, since they had been led to believe that no sex offenders would be placed on Uncas Avenue.
Although county supervisors have no say in mental health matters anymore, they held two public committee meetings on the Uncas Avenue facility two weeks ago. After hearing the testimony, Supervisor Marina Dimitrijevic requested that the minutes of the Health and Human Needs Committee be sent to the Mental Health Board and also formally asked that the board hear public testimony during its Dec. 17 meeting.
But Mental Health Board Chair Kimberly Walker decided that no public testimony would be taken during its Dec. 17 meeting. To put this in context, Milwaukee County has a Mental Health Board of unelected people, who can spend county dollars, but the county taxpayers aren’t even allowed to comment on how these tax dollars are being spent.
Instead, visitors to the Behavioral Health Complex on Watertown Plank Road, the site of the hearing, had to go through security, including having bags searched and being wanded, apparently for weapons.
The Uncas Avenue matter had been the final item on the Dec. 17 agenda. But Board Member Duncan Shrout asked for it to be moved to the top of the agenda, so that it would be heard shortly after the meeting began at 8 a.m. Anyone wanting to come to the meeting for this agenda item would have planned to come later in the meeting, since the Uncas Avenue item was lower down on the agenda. Therefore, with this move to put the Uncas Avenue matter at the top of the agenda, even if the public had been allowed to speak, they would have missed their opportunity, likely arriving long after the board finished its discussion.
At least three Uncas Avenue neighbors attended the meeting but none were able to tell the board about the impact of their decision on their lives.
Debra Ross sat in the front row with a large sign saying “Uncas No Sex Offenders,” but no board members acknowledged her.
Instead of sitting silently, Dennis Hughes stood up at the end of the board’s discussion and spoke out about the concerns BHD staff have about two patients who are likely to live on Uncas Avenue.
After his arrest, no board members acknowledged what had just transpired in front of them, although they did discuss implementing publicly accessible emails.
Colón emailed the Shepherd about the ability of the public to speak out on the facility.
“There have been several vehicles for Uncas neighbors to voice their thoughts,” Colón emailed. “The Mental Health Board decided not to have public comment because it was not going to change outcome of our direction. In addition, more testimony regarding this issue further stigmatizes our clients who do not deserve this.”
End-of-Year-Deadline
Although Colón emailed that “politicians cannot stop this from moving forward,” the total closure of the long-term hospital unit by the end of the year and the opening of the Uncas Avenue facility could be up in the air.
Earlier this month, state Sen. Chris Larson and state Rep. Christine Sinicki, both Milwaukee Democrats who represent the Uncas Avenue neighborhood, contacted state Health and Human Services Secretary Kitty Rhoades to ask that the state delay the licensing of the Uncas Avenue facility.
That could conflict with the end-of-year deadline set for the closure of the last long-term hospital unit and the release of the final patients.
“The provider is in the process of receiving the [community-based residential facility] license,” Colón emailed. “Once this occurs, the remaining residents will be transitioned into the community.”
In addition, at the Dec. 17 meeting of the full Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors, which coincided with the Mental Health Board meeting, the majority voted to once again formally request that the Mental Health Board take public testimony on the Uncas Avenue facility. That request was made by Supervisor Jason Haas, who represents the neighborhood.
Moreover, the board approved a Supervisor Dimitrijevic-sponsored amendment to send a $140,000 Health and Human Services “workforce engagement and program development” contract back to committee. The contract is for Kane Communications Group, which already has an $89,000 contract for BHD PR.
