The Milwaukee County District Attorney has been investigating the city’s Health Department regarding its failed lead prevention program.
An independent third party has begun to look into Milwaukee’s lead prevention program, including what happens when a child tests positive for elevated blood lead levels. This comes after the Common Council asked for an audit to be done for the last 5 years of the lead prevention program in February of 2018.
The Public Health Foundation (PHF), a Washington D.C. based firm, is performing the audit. PHF has worked with over 500 public health organizations in the last seven years alone. They will mainly be assessing what originally went wrong with the Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program, and what can be improved.
“At the end of the day, what's most important for a program like this is the staff. It's the training, it's the know how, it’s the consistency… it’s the staff that makes a difference in a program like this,” said Ron Bialek, executive director of the Public Health Foundation during a Milwaukee Public Health and Safety Meeting last week.
The audit may not be completed until April 2020 and will cost around $250,000. City Comptroller Martin Matson, whose office was first called upon to perform an audit in February 2018, said the process will be closely monitored by the city.
|
|
“Even in fixing it, it’s going to take a longer length of time than what any of us would want, but that’s the nature of what it is,” Matson said.
However, not all of Milwaukee’s aldermen were excited that the audit won’t be performed by a local agency.
“I feel a disconnect as far as where you are and where your team is and where your subject staff is,” said Alderman Mark Borkowski, a Public Health and Safety committee member.
Although PHF will not be present in Milwaukee every day of the audit, they will be back and forth “on a number of different occasions,” said Bialek. They will also be looking at what went wrong in the past, and provide training and technical assistance to lead abatement employees going forward.
Bialeck said PHF will examine what happens with the program starting when a child is diagnosed with elevated blood levels, to remediation of the property that caused that level.
Milwaukee’s childhood lead detection program received three new employees in the 2020 city budget, but the total Milwaukee Health Department reported a shortage of 43 employees last fall. The Health Department was reached out to for current staffing numbers Wednesday, but they did not respond.
Milwaukee’s lead program made headlines in 2018 when former Health Department Commissioner Bevan Baker resigned from the department amidst problems occurring in the lead program. Multiple investigations followed, but new Commissioner of Health, Jeanette Kowalik, said the program was set to make a turnaround when she came on last fall.
