Photo by Tom Jenz
David Crowley 2023
David Crowley
County Executive David Crowley chisels away at his job like an experienced tradesman. In fact, he comes from a trades family. His dad is a retired master electrician, his uncle a retired carpenter and his stepbrother a master plumber.
But when Crowley was growing up, there were family troubles with both parents struggling with drug addiction and mental health issues. He often turned to the streets for support. “You might say I found love within my community,” he told me.
At Bay View High School, he joined the youth organization, Urban Underground, which, as he said, “saved my life and taught me how to love myself, love my community, and how to get outside my comfort zone.” After high school, he went into public service. “I had to interact with city, county and state government policy makers,” he commented. Crowley became a legislative aid, which led to winning a seat in the state assembly, which led to his winning the county executive race in 2020.
Four years later, at age 38, Crowley was named Public Official of the Year by Governing Magazine. He has a big job, looking out for about 914,000 county residents. He is also responsible for overseeing non-elected county offices like the Department of Health & Human Services, Milwaukee County Parks, Department of Transportation, Office of Emergency Management and the Milwaukee County Zoo.
I met Crowley at the Pilcrow Coffee Shop on Walnut at the edge of Downtown. His charm is catching, checkered with speckles of humor. He’s the type of guy you’d want for your neighbor.
Every major leader kind of grows into and defines the job. How do you see your job as County Executive?
I am responsible for the taxpayer dollars and responsibly investing that money into local programs and services. I ensure that Milwaukee County is connecting the residents, nonprofits and organizations to the services we offer to our most vulnerable residents. That includes housing, mental health, services for seniors and young people. I also try to connect the state legislators to the county.
Through my own travels, I often see you out and about among the residents. You do spend time on the ground.
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I think it’s important to educate people on the different levels of government. A lot of citizens know about what the federal, state, and city governments are doing. Not enough people understand what county government does.
One thing it does well is maintain the beautiful Milwaukee County parks. People I talk to in the county parks think the city runs these parks.
I do this exercise at citizen gatherings. I say, “If you’ve ever ridden the city bus, raise your hands.” All hands go up. I say, “No, you’ve never ridden a city bus because those busses are run by the county.” We have to make people aware of county services including the parks.
Can you roughly break down the major components of the 2025 budget and how is it decided? Is the revenue funded only by taxes?
As for revenue sources, one is property taxes where we get most of our money. Two is the .09 percent sales tax. Three is shared revenue from the state of Wisconsin. Four is registration fees. Five is grants from public and private institutions.
And how are the revenues spent? What programs and services?
There are state mandated services like our sheriff’s office. That includes the Downtown jail holding many dangerous offenders—and also the Community Reintegration Center that incarcerates less dangerous individuals, many who have committed misdemeanors. We are also responsible to man the courts with bailiffs, which means 114 sheriff deputies and judicial services. A judge might sentence a serious youth offender to incarceration at Lincoln Hills, which costs the county about $450,000 per year, and that is just for one child. Our public safety costs are rising. The large Health & Human Services department—aging, disability, mental health, children—is another big component of expenditures. Then there is housing, family services and veteran services.
I understand that sales tax revenues are falling short of projections. What is currently going on with this issue?
The revenues we receive to cover the critical state mandates do not align with the costs of the mandates. We receive shared revenue, transportation aids, etc., and they have been stagnant, which affects all counties across the state. In this new 2025 county budget, we will see a $13 million increase, 11% increase for the year. This increase should help us with our overtime costs, staffing, recruitment and critical services.
The term “affordable housing” gets used a lot by you and other politicians. What is affordable housing? How is it defined?
I would define affordable housing as apartments and houses that rent below the market rate. We have to work with developers to give them gap finances to bring down costs. The housing problem needs to be addressed across the country. There are so many people who do not make enough money to enter the market rate housing.
Then, to determine affordable housing, you go by whatever the housing market rate is?
Roughly, to enter into affordable housing, the occupants need to pay about 30% of their income, and the government picks up the rest. But it is also important to focus on helping these people get jobs.
It’s a complex issue.
Very complex. You can’t talk about housing without talking about jobs, and jobs mean having transportation to get to the job. You might say it is a cyclical problem.
Recently, Milwaukee County was selected to participate in the Just Home Project, a national program to advance community-driven efforts to break the link between homelessness and incarceration. This is led by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Urban Institute. Reading from the press release, “The Milwaukee County Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) will receive $375,000 to create a plan to disrupt the cycle of homelessness and continued engagement with the criminal justice system.” What exactly is the Just Home Project?
Many of the people who are homeless may have been involved with the justice system at some point. We need to find housing for them. At the Community Reintegration Center, we are doing a pilot project to teach skills to qualified incarcerated people who can be pipelined into a job or a school like MATC when released. The Just Home Project focuses on these people and also those who have a mental health crisis and are living on the streets.
That is a big job for the Just Home Project to handle.
That’s why we need the state and federal governments to step up and help with these kind of issues. Counties across the nation are looking to partner with their state governments and the federal government. Institutionalizing individuals may not be the way to go.
Nevertheless, the first priority must be to keep normal taxpaying citizens safe from mentally ill people who might get violent or steal property.
Definitely. That is why we have our crisis response teams.
On that same subject, you signed two bills into law. One is approving $2.5 million to pursue a mixed-use redevelopment of the existing Marcia P. Coggs Human Services Building that will create an estimated 65 affordable housing units. The second is approving $2 million for an affordable housing development in Oak Creek. When will these two developments be completed and who will qualify for residence?
Not sure on the completion timeline, but I’m excited about these two projects. In the Coggs Human Services Building, we will have the Milwaukee Behavior Health Services on the first floor. Both projects will be affordable housing. Working with Habitat for Humanity and the developer Michael Emem, we are also building single family homes in the King Park area.
On the subject of mental health, you have rolled out a set of treatment-based approaches, funded by opioid settlement money. You are one of the leaders in mental health.
Mental health is a subject that is near and dear to me. When you have family members who have suffered from mental health issues and substance abuse disorders, you understand. In the county, we’ve been installing harm reduction vending machines. So far we have 11 machines with another eight on the way.
What products are available in those vending machines?
There is Narcan, which reverses an opioid overdose, and medical pouches to safely discard prescription drugs. There are fentanyl strips, which identify the presence of fentanyl in the bloodstream. There are also gun locks to secure your firearm. This is part of the network around health and human services. We have also invested $8.5 million in grassroots organizations and county programming that focus on substance abuse disorder and prevention. But Milwaukee County cannot do this alone. We work with nonprofit and individual partners.
Do you base your efforts on certain neighborhoods and communities that report the most substance abuse? I’m thinking of the Northwest side and also the South Side, the poorest neighborhoods. Do you have a map?
It’s hard to map out the areas exactly, but the Milwaukee County Dashboard does show the worst areas for abuse. We look for spike alerts, meaning a tainted batch of drugs found in certain neighborhoods. This helps us alert the grassroots organizations that work directly with drug users. I’m thinking of Ken Ginlack and his Serenity Inns right there in the inner city, and Vin Baker and his Vin Baker Recovery Center doing addiction treatment. It is going to take all of us to help people in kicking the habit.
From what I understand, you have been able to establish new rapid transit bus lanes—the county’s first meaningful investment in transit in at least 30 years. The goal is to get public transit to take people all around the county. Can you elaborate?
Connect 1 takes people from the lakefront all the way to the medical complex in Wauwatosa. But we will need more funds to expand our rapid transit system. The state mandated services eat up a lot of our revenues.
There are people from Chicago who have better access to jobs in Racine and Kenosha than we in Milwaukee do. We have to keep improving our transit system. Currently, with the WISCO card in conjunction with the Waukesha transit system, you can take a bus to Waukesha and transfer to the Waukesha transit system using the WISCO card. The idea of all this is to give people access to employment and recreational opportunities. We want people to have the opportunity to take public transit to municipalities in our county and in southeastern Wisconsin.
I did not know this, but Goodwill’s partnership with Milwaukee County supports thousands of housebound adults over the age of 60, providing meals at no cost. Can you comment?
That is our Meals on Wheels program. We have been doing this program for many years, a great partnership with Goodwill. They feed about 1,500 older adults every single day. We get federal funding to support this program.
As you move forward in your job, what is still left to accomplish?
I want to strengthen the relationship between our state and federal partners, I want to bring resources back to Milwaukee County to provide for our priorities—affordable housing, mental health, parks, public transit, senior services, and public safety.
Public safety eats up 80% of our local property taxes. Milwaukee County is the economic engine of the state, but we cannot progress without the surrounding municipalities. My long-term goal is to show that government can truly work for the people.
