Editor's Note: This is Part One of a multiple part series The Damaged Legacy of Chris Abele. You can read the other parts here.
Never before in metro Milwaukee has anyone with nearly a billion dollars of inherited wealth cavalierly tinkered with so many levers of power and influence. Chris Abele’s business ventures, insidious political “investments” and grandstanding “benevolence” all intertwine and blur, functioning as a juggernaut. Abele’s relentless pursuit of cultural and political domination calls to mind someone breezing around a Monopoly board, buying up assets and placing others at the mercy of his whims.
However, civic life is not a game. Most crucially, the well-being of nearly a million Milwaukee County residents hangs in the balance—as well as the integrity of local democracy—as we face a trifecta of health, economic and social crises.
During Abele’s nine-year tenure as Milwaukee County executive, the checks and balances of representative democracy were gutted through rewriting of state law meant to further empower himself. Some of Milwaukee County’s most valuable public assets, including prime downtown land, were ceded to private ownership or control—exacerbating economic inequities. Abele, the son of a Boston billionaire, spent his inheritance with abandon in attempts to elect proxy politicians, furthering what Richard L. Hasen, a national expert on elections, calls “political inequality.” And, despite his leaving elected office on May 4, the Abele Era is ominously not over. He said he intends to keep aggressively electioneering with financial “resources” he controls.
In doling out money from his family’s Argosy Foundation, Abele routinely has thumbed his nose at established protocols for donors, as documented in a February 2005 Milwaukee Magazine profile. However, Abele’s benefaction and venture-capitalism dabbling are not the focus of this analysis, except when they play a role in schemes to have his way with our body politic. Instead, this series probes how Abele toyed with representative democracy, governmental safeguards and public assets designated to serve the common good. Actions speak louder than words and Abele’s actions often have screamed.
Stripping Elected Representatives of their Power
In his first years as an elected official, Abele stumbled and struggled with the give-and-take of political negotiation. However, with the help of Republican state legislators (whom he funded) and Gov. Scott Walker, Abele was able to able to grab more power for himself and disempower Milwaukee County’s Board of Supervisors—the better to get his way. In 2013, the apprentice politician succeeded in lobbying the Republican-led state Legislature to strip the county board of most of its oversight and policy-making role, through a bill called Act 14. In 2015, Abele further maneuvered (through Act 55) to acquire authority over most county property, except for land specifically zoned as “parkland” at the time of a transaction.
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No other Wisconsin county executive holds such power, and numerous land-use experts have decried this anti-democratic pre-empting of legislative oversight and citizens’ input about common assets. In wresting more power for himself—and future Milwaukee County executives—Abele ruthlessly reduced elected representatives’ ability to protect constituents’ interests.
Abele opined to Marquette Law School’s Mike Gousha in January that “experts” appointed by the executive should make most governmental decisions, not elected representatives. Despite Abele’s scattershot education, he ironically characterized supervisors’ advocacy for constituents and transparency as “want[ing] to get involved in a lot of decisions about which they don’t have a lot of expertise.” Diminishing the policy-making role of elected representatives leaves voters without forums for their concerns. Removing oversight and accountability of community resources conveniently facilitates autocracy, inequity and exploitation for private profit.
The Insularity of Extreme Privilege
Several insiders said, on condition of anonymity, that as county executive Abele surrounded himself with people who said what he wanted to hear—retreating into a cozy echo chamber. Wisconsin State Rep. David Bowen, a former Milwaukee County supervisor, told Milwaukee Magazine’s Larry Sanders recently that Abele, who grew up in East Coast splendor, “came from a background where he wasn’t used to working-class families, Midwestern style. He was just not in tune” with the values of many supervisors and their constituents. “Add to that Abele’s private nature, and hardly anyone in local politics claims much insight into his thinking,” wrote Sanders.
Bruce Colburn, a lifelong labor-union organizer working with Milwaukee and national labor networks, told this reporter that he and others sought for a decade to get Abele to understand concerns of Milwaukee County’s transit employees. “We kept trying but could never find anyone who had Abele’s ear. That was usually not the case with other elected officials,” said Coburn. On rare occasions, Abele directly heard from exasperated rank-and-file workers and others affected by actions taken or planned by his administration. Colburn said, “Abele took an immediate adversarial role in all negotiations. He would not even partner with transit workers on safety issues or in gaining increased financial support as the system faltered.”
Abele prefers to interact with the public in very controlled settings. He made a hasty retreat from a well-attended public hearing in Mitchell Park on a frigid February night in 2018. The event was in response to Abele’s wildly unpopular parking-meters-in-parks proposal. Abele briefly spoke to television crews and then, flanked by bodyguards, fled the jeering crowd.
Days later, Abele could not escape parallel outcries voiced by the mayors and village presidents of Milwaukee County’s 19 municipalities. At a monthly meeting of the Intergovernmental Cooperation Council, Abele was forced to listen as leader after leader told him that parking meters in parks was “the dumbest idea ever.” They said it would harm their local businesses, not just individuals who would have had to pay up to $3.50 an hour—to a private vendor—to visit the lakefront and other parks.
Although Abele rescinded the parking-meter scheme the next morning, he had ignored warnings about harmful ramifications. Fred Royal, president of Milwaukee’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, had already written an op-ed in the Shepherd, “Paid Parking in Parks Raises Social Justice Issues.” Royal said: “Abele’s administration seems oblivious to the imposition that paid parking in parks will place on people of limited means. A day at the beach might soon cost $15—or way more if you get a parking ticket. Misleading platitudes by Abele that paid parking will encourage people to walk, bicycle or take the bus to enjoy a park blithely ignore the realities of the distance many residents live from the lakefront and other major parks.” And Milwaukee County buses do not directly access the lakefront and numerous popular parks.
Rampant Governmental Secrecy
Wisconsin’s cornerstones of clean government are open-meetings and public-records laws, which mandate how governmental entities must operate “in the sunshine,” rather than in back rooms and through sweetheart deals.
Nonetheless, for two years, behind closed doors, Abele plotted his failed “sweetheart” sale of O’Donnell Park to Northwestern Mutual. Abele’s “O’Donnell Park Workgroup” consisted of county staff members; the park-scale scheme was based on calling the park “surplus property.” It was all revealed in midsummer 2014. A drumbeat campaign followed, urging rubberstamping by county supervisors. Letters pushing the deal were penned by representatives of Abele-funded organizations. Facing fierce citizen opposition, however, the county board rejected the park’s sale in December 2014.
Despite Milwaukee County’s Anti-Secrecy Policy, Abele and his administrators often operated in the shadows, in other meetings, as I reported in the Shepherd in 2018, Four committees addressing county parks issues, convened by the Abele administration, repeatedly conducted secret meetings, defying Open Meetings Law.
The Milwaukee County Parks’ “Pay-to-Park Work Group” (which proposed parking meters in county parks), was “specifically subject to Wisconsin’s Open Meetings Law” (OML), according to the county’s corporation counsel, Margaret Daun. Other committees that failed to post public meeting notices were the “Earned Revenue Task Force” (formed by Abele); the “Ravine Road Bridge Work Group” (which considered options for a historic park bridge); and Abele’s “Conservatory Advisory Committee” formed by him to recommend policy options for the Mitchell Park Domes. That entity preceded the county-board-established Mitchell Park Conservatory Task Force, which did observe Open Meetings Law.
Thus, secret policymaking was institutionalized under Abele—and without repercussions.
Abele also flagrantly gave secret pay raises totaling $185,000 to 27 top county employees, including $50,000 to Hector Colon, then director of Health and Human Services. A circuit judge ruled in 2017 that the raises were illegal. Attorney Susan Crawford of Pines Bach in Madison, who had represented the county board, said of the decision: “Even though legislation enacted in the past few years has expanded County Executive Abele’s authority beyond that of any other county executive in the state, his primary role is still to execute the board’s policies, not to act unilaterally. The court’s decision upholds the democratic principles of separation of powers and checks and balances in Milwaukee County government,” she said. https://urbanmilwaukee.com/pressrelease/county-executive-abele-granted-unlawful-raises/
Pervasive Pollution of the Civic Environment
Abele has repeatedly fouled metro Milwaukee’s civic environment with escalating dumps of toxic money into campaigns, including through his very flush funding pipeline, “Leadership MKE,” formed in 2018. Abele has reportedly channeled at least $6 million into election campaigns, mostly in Wisconsin, through this front organization. Those financial pollutants will persist and proliferate—mostly beneath the surface of the now-fetid pond of Milwaukee County government that Abele left behind.
In Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections, Richard L. Hasen cited three ways that massive campaign spending harms democracy: in terms of electoral outcomes, legislative influence, and public confidence. He contended that the polluting impact of unfettered money in politics is not merely about overt quid-pro-quo corruption. Unfettered cash in campaigns engenders “political equality.”
Hasen wrote that the issue is not whether a plutocrat “expects something in return for her spending. Whether or not she does, this is not the central problem with such an obscenely large amount…The people and its government have a vital interest in preventing disparities in economic power from being further transformed into disparities of political power…especially in our age of rising inequality…Otherwise American elections and policy battle are no better than lotteries in which the rich get to purchase many extra tickets and most voters will consistently lose.”
Strings-attached Giving
In a 2005 article called “The Billionaire’s Son” in Milwaukee Magazine, several people described Abele’s pattern of intrusive meddling in nonprofit organizations. Mary Van De Kamp Nohl quoted a “veteran nonprofit fund-raiser: ‘[Abele’s] philanthropy comes with strings attached; he doesn’t just demand results, he crosses the line and comes to help run the organization.’ [Fiserv’s former board chair Leslie] Muma “accepted Abele’s explanation that he needed to ‘be involved to control the outcomes’ generated by his donations, but local philanthropy consultants dispute that. They cite numerous examples where donors set up procedures to monitor performance without running an organization themselves. And many foundations, including the Bradley, prohibit officials from serving on any nonprofit board they support.”
Abusing Financial Entitlement
Abele targeted numerous county supervisors and other elected officials with whom he disagreed, even on minor issues, funneling a million dollars through Leadership MKE in 2018 elections alone. Abele spent $200,000 trying, unsuccessfully, to oust former Milwaukee County Board Chair Theo Lipscomb. Disconcertingly, Abele’s cash apparently did sway three other supervisor elections. And the persistent infusion of Abele’s slush-fund absolutely has had a chilling effect on local elected officials, said former state representative Fred Kessler, who was also defeated by an Abele-funded candidate in 2018.
Author Hasen confirmed how big money corrupts: “It is no longer just [buying] access that matters. Money’s potentiality is sometimes enough to cause a skew.” He said that even the threat of a money dump “against an elected official sometimes seems enough to get that official to shift priorities.”
Although Abele has left public life for now, he clearly intends to continue using family wealth to manipulate elected officials through Leadership MKE. He also said he may seek higher office, after he builds a lakefront home in Shorewood. Given his penchant for meddling, how will Abele now operate as a private citizen? How might Abele’s well-known strings-attached funding and secrecy manifest? Distressingly, this transplanted plutocrat appears determined to keep undermining local democracy and civic conversations, even as we try to address long-standing inequities and current health and economic upheaval.
Editor's Note: This is Part One of a multiple part series The Damaged Legacy of Chris Abele. You can read the other parts here.
