Did Harbor Commissioner Serve Illegally?

Ron San Felippo. Photo by Michael Horne.

Last week Wednesday Urban Milwaukee interviewed businessman and city Harbor Commissioner Ron San Felippo as to whether he is actually a city resident, which is a requirement for commission members. San Felippo owns a home in Florida where his wife resides and votes and they also own a home in East Troy, WI. They have owned these homes for years, while San Felippo claimed to be living in an office suite in the Warehouse Lofts Building on 2nd and St. Paul.

San Felippo had trouble answering my questions and toward the end of the interview said this: “I don’t have a problem resigning from the Harbor Commission if there is a question of whether I’m spending enough time in the city. I think your call is helping me finalize that decision.”

Less than three hours later he emailed to say he had resigned from the commission and shortly after that Jeff Fleming, spokesperson for Mayor Cavalier Johnson, informed me of the resignation.

San Felippo has served on the Harbor Commission for nearly a quarter century, since 2000. Meanwhile city voting records, which go back to 2012, show he regularly voted absentee from Florida. If he was not a city resident, both his service on the commission and his voting were done illegally.

The seven appointed members of the Harbor Commission serve without compensation, but yield considerable power. The commission is responsible for supervision of the day-to-day operations of Port Milwaukee, including harbor development and improvement, tourism and recreational use of the Port, and leases of harbor land and facilities, including the city land used by Summerfest.

The city has particularly stringent residency requirements for commissioners: By law a member of the Harbor Commission “must have been a resident of the City for at least three years at the time of his or her appointment.” That places an even higher legal burden on San Felippo, meaning he had to be living in the city the previous three years each of the nine times he was reappointed to the commission.

San Felippo and his wife Margaret once had a home on Pleasant St. on the Lower East Side but sold that in the late 1990s. In 1995, he and a partner bought a building at 413 N. 2nd St. on St. Paul Ave. and redeveloped it, converting it to condos and naming it “Warehouse Lofts” in 1997. San Felippo says he moved into Suite 620, which is a residential space, “as soon as it was completed.”

Precisely how many years he lived there is unclear. The current owner Matthew Schendel, told Urban Milwaukee he owns the Suite 620 condo and the previous owner was not Ron San Felippo and that this history goes back more than 10 years. Moreover, for more than 20 years San Felippo has claimed to live in Suite 100 in the building at 413 N. 2nd St. That’s the address he used when reappointed to the Harbor Commission in 2001 by Mayor John Norquist, and for his seven successive reappointments by Mayor Tom Barrett.

But Suite 100 is an office, not a residence. The city assessor describes Suite 100 as “Special Mercantile… with 1 commercial unit(s) and 0 residential unit(s), 0 total room(s), 0 total bedroom(s), 0 total bath(s), 0 total half bath(s), 0 total 3/4 bath(s).” The condo plan for Warehouse Lofts shows the office is 621 square feet.

When asked by Urban Milwaukee, San Felippo would not say how long he has owned a residence in Florida. He has been talking to people about his Florida home going back many years, acquaintances say. “I knew he had a place in Florida,” says Patrick Curley, who served as Mayor Barrett’s chief of staff for 14 years. “I knew he spent some of the winter months in Florida.”

Florida has long been home for Ron’s wife Margaret (Peg) San Felippo: she is a Florida resident, votes in Florida, where she has been a registered voter since 2002, and is a licensed real estate broker in that state. A 2002 Wisconsin court case lists her home address on Pine Point Road on Singer Island, Florida, and a letter from Ron and Peg San Felippo, at that same address, expressing “their displeasure with the proposed zoning ordinance,” was sent to the City of Riviera Beach Common Council in 2002.

The couple has changed homes in Florida over the years, living for at least a decade in the Town of Jupiter: a 2021 Wisconsin court case for a traffic violation lists Margaret’s home address in that city. In April of this year the couple moved to Englewood, on the Gulf Coast of Florida, where they bought a home for $2 million.

Yet Ron has remained a resident of Wisconsin and has voted absentee as a Milwaukee voter from Florida. Over a ten year period, from 2012 to 2022, San Felippo voted 13 times, all but once as an absentee voter, with the ballot sent to his home in Jupiter. Those absentee votes came at all times of the years, including elections in February and April 2022, February, April, August and November of 2020, November  2018, November 2016, April 2013, and May, June and November of 2012. Only in the August 2018 election did he vote in-person in Milwaukee.

Besides the home in Florida, Ron and Margaret San Felippo have been listed in Walworth County tax records as owners of a home in East Troy since at least 2016. Its assessed value as of 2023 was $1.5 million. But online records suggest the couple may have previously had homes in Waukesha and Washington counties. San Felippo declined to discuss if they owned past homes in the suburbs.

When asked about the fact that he claims an office with no bed or bathroom as his home, San Felippo says the suite has a bed but no bathroom, “but there’s a bathroom down the hall.”

But why would San Felippo, who is 78, ever stay overnight in an office when he has a lovely $1.5 million home in East Troy just 36 minutes away? “Sometimes I have early morning meetings,” he said.

“Am I spending more than half of the year here? Probably not,” he confessed. “I haven’t voted in Milwaukee in years. I’ve been concerned that I haven’t been spending enough time in the city. I don’t want to be running afoul of anything.”

But he hasn’t had a residential address in the city for at least 10 years and has been voting absentee in nearly every election through April 2022. And he agreed to serve another four years as a Harbor Commissioner in May, getting reappointed by Mayor Johnson. That would have extended his tenure on the commission to nearly 30 years.

Without mentioning San Felippo’s name, Urban Milwaukee shared the details of his various addresses and voting history to Matthew Westphal, a Milwaukee County Assistant DA for the Public Integrity Unit.

“It’s a red flag, but not by itself illegal” he said. “It all goes down to where you lay your head at night. If he is residing at that place of business he could still vote from there.”

But the fact the San Felippo was also serving as Harbor Commissioner while claiming an office address as a residence adds a second issue, Westphal conceded. “If he does not live there that could be a concern, because you are making an assertion that this is your residence. So that could be a case of defrauding the city. But I would have look in the situation in detail.”

Did the mayors know you had homes in East Troy and Florida? I asked San Felippo.

“Sure, they knew,” he said.

But Curley says “I had no idea Ron had a home in East Troy. I can’t speak for Mayor Barrett.”

As for Mayor Johnson, who reappointed San Felippo to the Harbor Commission in May, Fleming emailed this statement: “The Mayor tells me he did not discuss property or homes with Ron.”

The most recent reappointment of San Felippo raises another red flag. It lists his address as Suite 620 in Warehouse Lofts, the residential address he hasn’t lived in for more than a decade. When asked about that San Felippo said “that must be a typo,” then said, “oh, they must just taken the address from past appointments.”

But none of the past appointments used that address. So it had to come from San Felippo.

This is the first in a series of investigative stories.