As Milwaukee County ends its first full year under Act 14 and is learning to live with Act 203, two state laws that stripped the county board of much of its oversight power, less information is being presented not only to the board, but also to the public about the inner workings of county government.
The county executive’s $1.3 billion county budget was delivered late, many believe intentionally to limit proper oversight, and with few details about major policy changes. Major land deals are struck in private with select businesses. Bids to privatize county services are let out with little notice to local vendors so honest competition could ensue and the taxpayers get a fair deal. And mental health services are run by an unelected board with little public oversight.
The lack of transparency goes beyond a well-known rift between Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele and the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors.
The opaqueness of county business is beginning to fuel a behind-closed-doors effort to strip Milwaukee County of its assets—including valuable parkland on the lakefront and, as the Shepherd can report exclusively, in Greenfield—with county residents being none the wiser until long after the deals are struck, long after their voices could be heard.
Unprecedented Power
The movement that culminated in Act 14 was launched by the Greater Milwaukee Committee (GMC), a conservative business group with close ties to Abele and his friend and key advisor, conservative venture capitalist Sheldon Lubar. The bill was introduced in early 2013 by two suburban Republicans, former supervisor turned state Rep. Joe Sanfelippo (R-West Allis) and state Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills), with the blessing of Abele. The effort went far beyond any sort of “reform” pushed by Abele’s predecessor, Scott Walker.
Act 14, signed into law by Walker in May 2013, gutted the board’s power in unprecedented ways and deprived Milwaukee County taxpayers of the checks and balances on the county executive’s power to cut corrupt deals with his selected cronies. Act 14 turned the Milwaukee County executive into the most powerful one in Wisconsin. The 18 supervisors now have no ability to amend a contract, and contracts worth between $100,000 and $300,000 don’t even need full board approval but only the blessing of the Finance, Personnel and Audit Committee. Those worth less than $100,000 don’t get sent to the board at all. Only those contracts worth at least $300,000 need the full board’s approval. In addition, county supervisors lost their staffers, who were the ones who would spend the hundreds of hours carefully examining contracts and legislation, had their terms cut from four years to two, can’t weigh in on collective bargaining negotiations, and can’t get involved in the day-to-day operations of county business. Thanks to a referendum mandated in the bill, county voters cut supervisors’ pay to about $24,000, beginning in 2016.
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As the board lost power, the county executive filled the vacuum, gaining almost unchecked power for a public office. Abele now has the power to make appointments of department heads and fill those vacancies without a confirmation by supervisors; call special meetings of the board and introduce legislation; and submit contracts to the board, when necessary, that only receive an up-or-down vote by the board.
But that’s not the only radical change in county government. Earlier this year, Abele sought and won a new state law—again, pushed by Sanfelippo, this time with state Sen. Leah Vukmir (R-Wauwatosa)—that created a new Mental Health Board (MHB) made up of appointed members. According to the new Act 203, this unelected board has the power to craft a budget for the county’s mental health services that the board can’t cut, although Abele can make adjustments, and it doesn’t have to present much information to the board or the taxpayers. In addition, the MHB has the power to enter into contracts that the board cannot consider, including contracts to privatize services.
Thanks to these two new laws, the Abele administration now runs the county with little oversight from the board, almost obliterating any notion of checks and balances that are found in clean and open government run by co-equal branches. Abele is now free to preside over county government with little public input or transparency, a strategy he’s come to use over and over again. When dubious actions like this occur in developing countries, democratic countries like the United States, the United Kingdom and most of Europe are sharply critical.
“It goes beyond Act 14,” Supervisor Theo Lipscomb told the Shepherd. “It’s the attitude of this administration. It’s the reason they wanted Act 14 but it’s their attitude toward governing. They push their agenda through and they don’t expect there to be oversight.”
Lipscomb, a member of the Finance, Personnel and Audit Committee, which is tasked with vetting contracts and working through a line-by-line review of the budget, said Abele’s penchant for secrecy is worse than anything seen under Walker. At least the Walker administration presented its budgets on time and had aides on hand during the board’s deliberations to clarify policy items within it, Lipscomb said.
This year, in contrast, Abele delivered his budget later than in previous years, with no details about big policy items such as a major restructuring of employee benefits, offered no aides to provide information to supervisors as they amended the budget, and then sent over his two dozen vetoes less than 24 hours before the board was scheduled to review and vote on them. When Abele finally did provide details about his changes to the county’s benefits package, they showed that he was cutting employees’ pay by 4.8% to 8%.
“I’d say it’s worse under the Abele administration,” Lipscomb said. “Clearly in the amount of detail they provided up front in the budget document but also in the fact that they just weren’t available for budget hearings.”
Lipcomb also pointed to a contract to privatize security services at the Marcia P. Coggs Human Services Building. The Abele administration sent a boilerplate resolution for privatizing security “at county facilities” to the board, and Lipscomb said the company in question was in the courthouse the day of the vote, apparently to pitch its services for courthouse security as well. The language only changed to target the Coggs building after supervisors raised questions about it, Lipscomb said.
“We had to really pull teeth to sort of extract that information,” Lipscomb said.
But Brendan Conway, Abele’s spokesman, denied that the county executive was keeping supervisors in the dark.
“The county executive believes strongly in an open and transparent process of public communication,” Conway emailed the Shepherd. “As we did before the law change, we continue to communicate frequently and openly with elected officials across the county as well as members of the public and other stakeholders.”
Contracts in Question
Abele’s also withheld information from supervisors and the public about requests for proposals (RFPs) and multimillion-dollar contracts that need to be vetted publicly. The most egregious examples can be found within the cash-strapped Milwaukee County Parks System, which oversees valuable parkland and assets around the county that some view as ripe for commercial development, including seemingly priceless lakefront property.
For example, as the Shepherd first reported in August, the administration let out a fast-tracked RFP for concessions, retail and catering at the Milwaukee County Zoo without notifying the board or any members of the parks committee. What’s more, local vendors also seemed to be left in the dark about the contract and they blasted Abele’s RFP process when the board held meetings on the contract.
But the lack of transparency in awarding the contract didn’t deter Abele from inserting the contract with Denver-based Service Systems Associates (SSA) into his proposed 2015 budget; the board stripped it out, saying that it was a major policy item that deserved further debate and deliberation. Yet Abele used what’s known as a “Vanna White veto”—a type of veto that allows him to string together individual letters to form new words—to restore the contract in his budget. The board overrode his veto unanimously.
But that pales in comparison to proposals to sell off lakefront property for commercial development without a fully public RFP process. Not only has this allowed Abele to strike deals in private with developers, but it threatens to chip away at what’s known and admired by city planners throughout the country as the “emerald necklace” of public parks that rings Milwaukee County.
First, in 2012, the Abele administration offered a little-used Requests for Interest (RFI) for the Transit Center parcel, a more informal type of request for ideas than a traditional RFP. While most bidders offered vague proposals to transform the site, developer Rick Barrett served up a fully detailed plan to build The Couture, then conceived as a multiuse high rise with high-end condos, retail, a hotel and more. Abele was ready to sign off on the deal and presented it to the board as his preferred bidder, but prohibited supervisors from vetting all of the proposals in an open meeting. The board held public hearings on the project but the project was still ensnared by the state constitution’s Public Trust Doctrine, which requires former lakebed parcels to be held by public entities for the public good. Enter Abele’s conservative Republican legislator friends, who literally redrew the shoreline to allow Abele’s friend to move forward on his commercial development on the disputed property.
Add to the Couture saga the current offer by Northwestern Mutual Life (NML) to purchase O’Donnell Park on the lakefront. Once again, the Abele administration offered no public RFP; NML came to the county with an offer and Abele decided to take it. The $14 million bid as written will net the county just $5 million. But critics of the proposal—such as Supervisor Gerry Broderick, chair of the parks committee—say that the land is worth far more, up to $40 million. Why this much higher value? According to attorneys, there’s nothing in the agreement that requires NML to preserve the parcel as parkland. Although current city zoning requires that the land be used as a park for the public’s enjoyment, if NML purchases the property, attorneys point out that NML can ask the city to rezone the parcel and develop it as it sees fit. Once the deed restrictions are lifted, as many observers predict, that land will become the most valuable acreage in the state and the public will have no say in its use. The board will take up the matter on Dec. 18.
Supervisor Broderick said that the pending sale of O’Donnell Park represented the first major step in selling off parkland for commercial purposes.
Commercial development of the site “continues to be denied by those who support the sale of O’Donnell Park,” Broderick said. “I think that once they confront this reality they are going to have to see that slippery slope is perhaps much more a precipice than they had considered.”
Lease of Greenfield Park in the Works
Across town, another parkland deal is pending. As the Shepherd can report exclusively, a behind-the-scenes deal is being crafted between the county and city of Greenfield for the lease of Kulwicki Park, on Highway 100 and Coldspring Road. According to documents obtained through an open records request, a 15-year lease has been drafted for a $1 annual rent to be paid by Greenfield, with options to extend the lease.
Greenfield Mayor Michael Neitzke told the Shepherd that Greenfield had discussed leasing Kulwicki Park years ago, when Sue Black was parks director—Black was fired by Abele in 2012—but that those talks went nowhere until this spring, when current Parks Director John Dargle acted on it. Neitzke, a supporter of Act 14, denied that Abele had anything to do with it, although emails show that the mayor emailed the county executive about the deal as far back as July 2013.
“Abele isn’t the one pushing this thing,” Neitzke told the Shepherd.
Dargle didn’t return the Shepherd’s request to comment about the lease, but Abele’s spokesman Conway noted that the local supervisor, Anthony Staskunas, supports the deal, and that “the county executive has supported numerous partnerships with municipalities and other entities that has brought much needed resources to our great parks system.”
Broderick said he was troubled by the administration’s attempt to lease parkland without public discussion or even notifying him, the chair of the parks committee.
“This is Abele’s approach,” Broderick said. “It lends credence to the argument that Abele’s intent here is to turn the parks back to municipalities where the municipalities would choose to accept them back and in doing so undo the emerald necklace that is something that Milwaukee County is so proud of.”
Broderick said the county would have had more resources to keep up its parks if the Legislature—and the conservative Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce (MMAC)—hadn’t blocked the implementation of a half-cent sales tax for parks and cultural assets as approved by voters in a 2008 referendum. Ironically, an MMAC-led effort to push a similar referendum, including funding for a new sports arena, is now underway.
Abele’s spokesman Conway assured the Shepherd that the lease would go before the county board for a vote.
“All our park leases, including this one, require board approval,” Conway emailed.
Broderick said he wanted to bring the matter up for debate in a parks committee meeting as soon as he could. And he warned that while the lease of Kulwicki Park may seem benign on the surface, it could lead to leasing highly sought-after parkland to interested developers with little to no public involvement.
“What’s there to prevent the administration from leasing Lake Park or Grant Park, or encircling the golf courses with high-end condos?” Broderick said. “To say it’s troubling I think understates the facts. This will lead to a two-tier parks system, with have-parks and have-not parks.”
