Crowley’s Special Grants Office Secured $46.8 Million in 2022

Milwaukee County Courthouse. Photo by Graham Kilmer.

Milwaukee County’s new office dedicated to chasing grant funding secured nearly $50 million in 2022.

The county’s Grants and Special Projects Division was created by County Executive David Crowley Crowley in 2021 for the purpose of going after grant funding that the county was “leaving on the table.”

The idea for such an office specializing was part of Crowley’s campaign for county executive. While discussing the county’s long-term financial struggles as a candidate, Crowley said the county would ultimately need a change in its financial relationship with the state. “In the meantime, we have to get creative,” said Crowley about the need not to wait.

In 2022, the grants office applied for a reported $143.6 million in funding across 38 grant proposals. As of April 2023, the county had been awarded 19 of those grants totaling approximately $46.8 million.

“And this is an office that two years ago did not exist,” said Joe Lamers, director of the Office of Strategy, Performance and Budget. “So that’s a lot of funds that we’re seeking out now that we were not in the past, necessarily.”

The grants division is housed in the county’s budget office and led by Ashley Adsit, director of Grants and Special Projects. Along with going after grants, the division works with the county’s various departments and offices on project management and identifying priority projects for grant requests. The office also oversees the county’s federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds and money from settlements with opioid manufacturers and distributors, which has already eclipsed $100 million.

One of the division’s key tasks is working with department leaders to develop plans for projects that could receive grant funding. The county’s long-term structural deficit and years of budget cuts had left some government offices without any plans or projects ready to pursue.

The success of the grants office, though, has not been enough to materially change the county’s long-term financial picture. One-time grant funds do not solve the gap in the county’s operating budget, nor will they clear the county’s massive backlog of maintenance and infrastructure projects. In fact, many grants require some amount of local matching funding, often 20% or less of the grant. Finding enough matching funding has been a barrier to securing more awards, Adsit told supervisors on the county board’s Committee on Health Equity, Human Needs and Strategic Planning.

In 2022, the office received $2 million in ARPA funding for a pilot program that provides matching funding for grants to “stimulate grant development across county departments,” an April report notes. The goal is to achieve a 75% return on the $2 million in the matching fund program.

When Crowley first created the office, he told Urban Milwaukee that everything the county does has to be a “signal to the state” that it desperately needs revenue and it is exhausting all local avenues for getting it. Two years later Crowley and City of Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson are negotiating with leaders in the Republican-controlled state Legislature over legislation that would increase state aid to the county and provide the local governments with additional sales tax revenue to begin addressing their massive unfunded pension costs.