Planning Begins for New Criminal Courthouse

Milwaukee County Safety Building. Photo by Graham Kilmer.

Milwaukee County will begin looking for contractors to assist with planning and design for the nearly half-a-billion-dollar criminal courthouse project this month.

For roughly the past decade, county policymakers have struggled to push forward the development of a new criminal courthouse. The project, which will be the largest in county government history, will replace the aging and dilapidated Safety Building, 821 W. State St.

Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley successfully secured $9.45 million for planning and design for the project in the 2024 county budget. Preliminary estimates peg the cost to develop the new courthouse at approximately $488.4 million.

The Safety Building was originally a jail and does not meet modern design standards for criminal court proceedings. For example, criminal defendants are brought to trial through public hallways. The county slated the building for demolition years ago.

Until the 2024 budget process, county policymakers had spent the past decade working against an ever-tightening county budget.  Policymakers began the 2024 process with the first projected budget surplus in two decades thanks to the new 0.4% sales tax authorized in 2023.

The state provides funding for criminal courthouse projects. But there has to be local investment in the project. Joe Lamers, Director of the county’s Office of Strategy, Budget and Performance, pushed hard to fund design in the lead up to the 2024 budget process.

A massive courthouse project could take five to seven years to develop, and if the county doesn’t show momentum the project will stall out and the state will not budget for it, Lamers explained to the county’s ad-hoc committee tasked with ranking infrastructure projects in August 2023.

The most recent timeline for the project — laid out in the 2024 budget — would have the project completed by 2030.

In June, the county will begin soliciting potential contractors to assist with master planning for the project, site selection and development of the owners program. A detailed public request for proposals has not yet been released.

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