Board Grows Cautious As Legislature Debates Shared Revenue

Milwaukee County Courthouse. Photo by Graham Kilmer.

With negotiations concerning the future of Milwaukee County government happening some 75 miles away in Madison, the Milwaukee County Board has become newly attuned to the financial and political reverberations of any decisions it makes.

Frank discussion of the precarious position the county finds itself in were prompted by a resolution related to the county’s cultural spending. Sup. Peter Burgelis authored a resolution that would provide the War Memorial Center an additional $1.6 million in operating funds over the net 10 years. In 2013, the War Memorial became a legally independent organization from the county and owns and operates the memorial through the private non-profit Milwaukee County War Memorial Inc.

Burgelis’ resolution was setting the board up for a redo of a policy debate that played out approximately a decade ago, when County Executive Chris Abele sought to reduce long-term funding commitments for cultural institutions like the War Memorial and the Milwaukee Art Museum in light of the county’s financial trouble. The board, instead, voted to provide funding for the War Memorial for another decade, before slow-walking the funding down to zero between 2024 and 2034.

Reviving this debate outside of the budget process was sure to garner widespread attention, as it was a headline-generating discussion the last time around. But when Burgelis’ proposal was discussed Tuesday at the board’s Committee on Parks and Culture, supervisors seemed uninterested in debating the county’s policy toward cultural spending when the very fate of all county government funding hangs in the balance. The parks committee sent Burgelis a clear message: bad timing.

When the board put a series of non-binding referendums on county ballots in 2022 and 2023, one of the few conservative supervisors, Sup. Steve Taylor, pointed out to his colleagues that Republicans will view these referendums, concerning policy questions for which the board has no control, as thinly-veiled attempts to turn out Democratic voters.

Whether Taylor was prophetic or simply acting as a conduit for Republican misgivings, recent legislation shows Republicans in Madison were watching liberal counties like Milwaukee and Madison add questions about marijuana and abortion to their local ballots. Legislation changing the way local governments are funded was recently introduced in the state Assembly, and among its many provisions, one would eliminate the ability for counties to put advisory referendums on their ballot.

Two weeks later, the board’s Committee on Intergovernmental Relations was discussing a resolution that would request additional shared revenue from the state with none of the strings attached in the Assembly bill. Taylor, who supports additional shared revenue, but also supports “guardrails” on how the county spends it, had this to say, “I heard about referendum questions. We have no authority over abortions, we have no authority over guns, we have no authority on marijuana, yet, we spent money to put it on the ballot. And the Republicans in Madison, I talked about this, I said ‘You guys, my colleagues, they’re just watching us spend money to try to ramp up the vote in spring or in fall.’ And now you wonder why they’re taking that away?”

Exactly one day later, the board’s Committee on Personnel was considering a resolution from Sup. Ryan Clancy aimed at creating a travel expense fund for county employees traveling out of state to receive an abortion. While the county’s attorneys told supervisors that the resolution posed a high degree of legal risk and could be found illegal under state law, that wasn’t the only consideration that led the committee to vote for rejection of the resolution.

Sup. Steven Shea, a progressive who has often found himself on the same side of a vote as Clancy, a socialist, voted against it. Shea explained, “We’re looking for more shared revenue from the Legislature, and if we pass this, you know, they’re gonna say, ‘Well, if they can pay for abortions, they don’t need any more money.'”

Discussing the new War Memorial proposal Tuesday, Sup. Patti Logsdon said, “I was in on the meeting regarding shared revenue with our lobbyist, Alec [Knutson], and, you know, I just feel right now at this time, while they’re still debating exactly what our stipulations will be on shared revenue, I believe we should maybe wait until we actually have everything set in stone, and then vote on this with our budget voting.”

Logsdon was originally a co-sponsor of Burgelis’ resolution along with Sup. Felesia Martin. Both Logsdon and Martin pulled their sponsorship from the legislation at committee. Martin said she initially agreed to co-sponsor the legislation because three generations of her family have served in the military, but she pulled her support and also suggested the board consider it during the budget process.

The Crowley administration also did not support the resolution. Joe Lamers, director of the Office of Strategy, Budget and Performance, provided testimony to the committee explaining why “this is not the time” to reconsider the War Memorial agreement. Lamers said the proposal represents “a long-term funding agreement at a time when our fiscal outlook for the next five years is very challenging,” adding, “and we have some possible state funding out there right now, but it’s very uncertain at this point in time.”

Lamers went on to outline the county’s financial situation, which includes an annual structural deficit, the legacy costs of a bad pension deal two decades ago, state limits on revenue, staffing shortages, maintenance backlogs and diminishing local tax revenue for parks and transit, all of which contributes to an administration position that the county is not in financial shape to add new spending to its plate. The fiscal outline sketched by Lamers is also the same story the county has been telling state legislators as it attempts to negotiate a deal on legislation that will provide it with more revenue.

Burgelis’ proposal also prompted a reminder to supervisors that the current leaders in the state Legislature have no compunction about stripping authority away from the county board. Asked to advise whether the board could amend the War Memorial lease, Milwaukee County Corporation Counsel Margaret Daun told the board they did not even have the authority to do what Burgelis was proposing: “That was removed from the county board’s purview in Acts 14 and 55 a number of years ago.”

Daun was referencing state legislation passed in 2015 that knocked the board down to part-time and took away its authority over county land not zoned as parkland.