Editor's Note: This is Part Two of a multiple part series The Damaged Legacy of Chris Abele. You can read the other parts here.
Former Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele secretly negotiated the thwarted sale of O’Donnell Park to Northwestern Mutual in 2014. That sale would have erased from the public realm nine acres of prime parkland and downtown Milwaukee’s most visible public plaza. Abele’s sweetheart deal with Northwestern Mutual would have relinquished O’Donnell Park to the insurance company (Wisconsin’s largest corporation) for $13 million.
In the years prior, the county had spent well over $40 million to build the park. After Milwaukee County’s Board of Supervisors nixed this peculiar transaction in December 2014, Abele continued trying to sell O’Donnell Park—by hook or crook—including through stealth language in the state’s 2015 budget bill that would have let Abele cede it without board oversight.
During nine years in office (2011-2020), Abele’s relentless maneuvering warped our civic vision—away from focusing on the common good and toward what he considered “the bottom line.” Abele’s disregard for our community’s social compact was especially evident in his actions and attitudes regarding parks and other public enterprises. Through multiple power grabs—facilitated by Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled Legislature—Abele set about slicing and dicing the public’s inherited wealth, as if he himself, a billionaire’s boy, owned it.
Abele’s divestment scenarios included sales, transfers, privatization, demolition and other schemes for everything from the county-owned parks, Mitchell Park Domes, airport, zoo, Marcus Center for the Performing Arts and Milwaukee County Transit Service, to land set aside for future purposes. Some were executed; others were beaten back. Abele’s cold approach resembled “vulture capitalists” who acquire corporations to divest their assets.
Reducing access and availability of public spaces decreases opportunities for public gatherings, such as the current historic advocacy for civil rights and policing reform. American parks are “public forums.” Parks are rightfully where our most vital “exercising” can happen: free speech and assembly. Those rights are not protected on private property.
Sadly, the real value of our freely-accessible-to-all parks appears to have been lost on Abele (who, ironically, grew up in Concord, Mass. near Walden Pond—one of America’s most iconic parks).
Perverting Parks into “Revenue Streams”
Parks are also perfect for respite and recreation—which has been especially needed during this global pandemic. In summer people flock to our lakefront to cool off.
Milwaukee County residents have long favored a local sales-tax increase to provide specified and guaranteed funding for long-neglected county parks. County voters passed a nonbinding parks-funding referendum in 2008. The Wisconsin Legislature never enacted it.
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Abele never bothered to lobby the state Legislature for dedicated funding of parks, through a sales tax or other means. He also opposed increased borrowing for capital projects, even when interest rates remain low. Instead, he concocted his own perverse parks-funding “solution”: He unilaterally decided that Milwaukee County Parks should generate all of its operating revenue from concessions, fees and other charges. Abele embarked on his regressive pay-to-play measure without any public discussion. There was no concern whatsoever about how making parks de-facto profit centers would affect the working poor. No other major municipality in America has undertaken such a tactic, according to a spokesperson for the Trust for Public Land, which tracks parks-related data. https://www.tpl.org/parkscore
At a forum hosted by Friends of South Shore Park in October 2017, former Milwaukee County parks director John Dargle, Jr. reluctantly confirmed that Abele had indeed issued that edict. Producing ever-increasing revenue thus quietly became the skewed mission for Milwaukee County Parks. Jim Goulee, a panelist at the forum, said he learned about Abele’s dictate to make parks completely pay their way by 2024 in a meeting with parks staff. Laurie Muench corroborated that she was told of the “100% self-funding” goal during a temporary assignment with the department.
Dargle admitted that Abele did indeed expect Milwaukee County Parks to produce ever-higher income, with “no upper limit.” Dargle said Abele first wanted 75% of the 2018 parks budget to come from “earned revenue,” and that they compromised on 62%. Abele’s then-spokesperson confirmed those discussions. Dargle resigned abruptly and without explanation two months later. Six months after that, Daniel Bice reported in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that Abele’s administration had arranged secretly to pay Dargle $36,000 to settle a “possible discrimination claim” by Dargle.
Most local parks departments derive part of their budgets from concessions and fees. For example, 16 percent of Madison’s 2017 budget came from “earned revenue.” Milwaukee County now gets 60 percent of its clearly inadequate budget in this manner, up from 50 percent in 2017. Abele convened a secret “work group,” defying Wisconsin’s Open Meetings Law, to plot ways to extract ever-higher revenue from those who visit parks. Another task force secretly developed wildly unpopular plans for putting parking meters in parks.
Economics professor John T. Harvey wrote in a Forbes article in 2012, titled “Why Government Should Not Be Run Like a Business”: “Bear in mind, first, that ‘efficiency’ in the private sector means profit. Hence, to ask that the government be run like a business is tantamount to asking that the government turn a profit. The problem in a nutshell, is that not everything that is profitable is of social value and not everything of social value is profitable.”
Abele often called parks a “business line” and park visitors “customers.” If Abele’s now-entrenched regressive policies continue in David Crowley’s administration, it will intensify inequities. Predictable outcomes include:
- Fees for park amenities, already prohibitive for many people, will keep rising. More types of park access will be monetized.
- Milwaukee County’s glaring “two-tier system of parks” will be exacerbated, with some people enjoying “priority access” and higher levels of service.
- Only “paying customers” increasingly will be consulted, as worthy stakeholders, about parks matters.
- Parks and amenities that produce “insufficient revenue” will be targets for divestment. For example, Abele’s administration proposed closing Lincoln Park’s Schultz Aquatic Center in 2018, claiming that the only remaining outdoor pool on Milwaukee’s North Side was draining the county’s budget.
Community Groups Feel the Pressure
Abele’s money-making mandate also squeezed community groups hosting park gatherings, concerts, and farmers markets. For example, organizers of the hugely popular Milwaukee Winter Farmers Market at the Mitchell Park Domes got a phone call in March 2018 that the market would be ousted. There was no consideration of impacts on area small farmers and other vendors.
County administrators had decided, behind closed doors, that the market’s rental fee of $600 a week for the four-hour Saturday-morning event was peanuts compared to other imagined bookings. James Tarantino, appointed by Abele in 2017 as director of recreation and business services for Milwaukee County Parks, explained the eviction rationale in an email. “The focus on rentals (weddings, corporate, proms) is a high priority going into 2019. Just four Saturday rentals [during market months] would amount to more than the revenue generated by the market in its 23 events.” Even so, most of that pie-in-the-sky income would have gone to Waukesha-based Zilli Hospitality, which has an exclusive catering contract for Domes rentals.
At the time, market vendor Angela Moragne called ousting the market “a sacrilege.” Moragne—co-owner of That Salsa Lady, “the only Black and woman-owned salsa company in the U.S.”—said, “Here in segregated Milwaukee, this is the one place where everyone comes together” from all socioeconomic backgrounds.
Alarmed by the Abele administration’s attempt to oust the farmers, the County Board placed the issue on a public hearing agenda. This enabled vendors and market supporters to fight for its survival. Chastened, Abele’s aides met with market organizers and negotiated a new lease. Had the eviction proceeded, farmers and food producers would have suffered, along with local “flavor” and culture.
Revved-up Privatizing of Public Spaces
Abele promulgated privatization as a go-to solution for all challenges facing parks and other public assets. At a luncheon about “public-private partnerships” in December 2018, Abele off-handedly remarked that it was not like Milwaukee County was doing such a great job of managing its assets—interestingly not taking personal responsibility for any supposed mismanagement.
Although some partnerships—such as nonprofit conservancies—work to protect and preserve public assets, others can run rough-shod over the public’s interest. Misguided, poorly conceived and mismanaged partnerships can diminish public access and inequitably exploit the commons.
Jerold Kayden, a professor of urban planning and design at Harvard University, told WBUR in 2017: “The privatization of the public realm…results potentially in a feeling that we’re not really all in this together. That there’s not a level playing field. There are areas for wealthier people, and then there are areas for poorer people. I mean the signature element of public space is that it is open to all, regardless of income, regardless of status, with a relative lack of interference…everybody is involved. That gets harmed, or reduced, when people no longer feel that public spaces are truly public.”
Recently, a Milwaukee professional involved in prominent civic projects, speaking off the record, said that cutting the public out of decision-making about public-private partnerships is necessary. Otherwise, private entities would not assume management of public spaces if they had to consider public concerns. Apparently, Milwaukee’s “Sewer Socialist” motto of “The greatest good for the greatest number” has been given the heave-ho.
Some ramifications of privatization in Milwaukee County include:
- Management and staff of private entities sometimes act as if they own public spaces where they merely have been granted a contract. A Starbucks employee in Red Arrow Park called the police three times in 2014 to complain about Dontre Hamilton being in the park, where he was legally resting. The third-called policeman fatally shot Hamilton 14 times, after provoking Hamilton into a struggle.
- Public access increasingly is based on ability to pay. Only paying customers can use some seating areas and restrooms in county-owned park facilities. (That was the case even before most facilities were closed in response to COVID-19.)
- Signs, including ones bearing Milwaukee County Parks’ logo, warn visitors in numerous parks (with “public-private partnerships”) about “No carry-in food or beverages.”
- Green space gets viewed as expendable, such as when Milwaukee County pushed a plan to chop down mature trees in Downtown’s Pere Marquette Park to make way for a privately controlled beer garden. The area is already over-served by bars and restaurants.
- Citizens get excluded from decision-making about public spaces. Marcus Center for the Performing Arts needed the approval of only one person—Abele in his role as county executive—to cut down a grove of trees in the county-owned public plaza. Abele stayed in the shadows and kept mum, as residents pleaded for the trees.
Orwellian Warping of Language
When Abele announced a pending contract to sell O’Donnell Park—Milwaukee’s Downtown plaza with panoramic lakefront views, to Northwestern Mutual, it was based on cynically declaring the park “surplus property” and thus subject to liquidation. The term surplus property usually refers to worn-out governmental vehicles and equipment. O’Donnell Park had been redeveloped just 20 years earlier to include a convenient, income-generating parking facility. Documents justifying the fire-sale terms also described the park as near the end of its “useful life,” an absurd assertion. Foundationally, American parks exist in perpetuity.
In George Orwell’s cautionary novel 1984, “Newspeak” language facilitated anti-democratic political ends by using words to mask their real meaning and refer in fact to their exact opposites. In Orwellian fashion, Abele’s acolytes repeatedly said O’Donnell Park was little used. In fact, cell-phone-photo data revealed it as Milwaukee’s most-visited downtown destination in a 2015 report about local hospitality and entertainment.
During a rare public “town hall” appearance in November 2015, Abele was asked why he was so intent on dumping O’Donnell Park, Downtown’s most-valuable plaza. Abele answered that he was more interested in retaining land that had never been developed. Since parks invariably are “developed,” Abele’s obtuse reasoning meant they might all be up for sale. In 2015, Abele appointed Teig Whaley-Smith (who previously authored the spurious rationale for the wisely quashed sale of O’Donnell Park) to serve as Milwaukee County’s director of administrative services. Whaley-Smith then proceeded to also lord over parks-management throughout the Abele era, including the failed push to install parking meters in parks.
Hell-bent on Depriving Citizens of Parks
Sales of parks are “extremely rare,” according to Peter Harnik, retired founder of The Trust for Public Land’s Center for City Park Excellence and its ParkScore Index. Nonetheless, Abele kept gnawing on the notion like a dog with a bone. He relentlessly tried to normalize selling or privatizing parks.
In 2015, Abele maneuvered to get language inserted into the state’s budget bill giving him authority to sell or make deals involving any property owned by Milwaukee County—without county board oversight. Abele’s brazen power grab was limited only slightly to exclude land zoned as a park—a toothless distinction since zoning is easily changed. This anti-democratic authority, granted solely to Milwaukee County’s executive, leaves citizens powerless over consequential decisions made about public property.
Abele’s indifference to parks and their role in public health, and his active elimination of protections for public assets, will have long-term consequences. As living conditions worsen during this global pandemic and economic depression, will Milwaukee County’s parks continue to be viewed as discretionary niceties—and thus subject to liquidation? Or will the Crowley administration decisively declare the irrefutable importance of our parks? Free public access, collective health and democracy are all at stake.
Editor's Note: This is Part Two of a multiple part series The Damaged Legacy of Chris Abele. You can read the other parts here.
