Gómez-Tom Advances County’s First Multilingual Initiative

Milwaukee County Courthouse. Photo by Graham Kilmer.

Supervisor Caroline Gómez-Tom has tentatively secured funding to advance a multilingual initiative across county government.

The Milwaukee County Board’s Budget Committee unanimously supported a proposal from Gómez-Tom to set funding aside to make government information multi-lingual. The $100,000 proposal will go to the full county board with the committee’s recommendation for inclusion in the final budget.

In September, Gómez-Tom successfully passed legislation committing the county to developing “options to equip departments with the necessary resources/training to provide public information forms, websites, and other communications in Spanish, Hmong, and other relevant languages, upon request, to residents with Limited English Proficiency.”

Gómez-Tom said that while the study had only been approved the month prior, she wanted to ensure there were resources budgeted so that the county could move swiftly to implement whatever came back to the board.

The county could have made vital information multilingual “a decade ago, if not longer,” the supervisor said. “And so I’m trying to make up for lost time.”

The amendment does not add a new expense to the budget. It sets aside $100,000 from the county’s rainy-day account for 2024.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Gómez-Tom worked as a healthcare navigator. She said watched as information was disseminated by governments at the federal, state and local level, and noticed that real-time information in multiple languages was difficult to find in the early days of the pandemic. Often, it was up to communities and organizations working at the local level to translate important information related to the pandemic.

She explained to her colleagues in September that the experience inspired her to push the multi-lingual policy to have all vital, public-facing information provided in multiple languages.