Crowley Seeks to Replace McGovern Senior Center

McGovern Park Senior Center. Photo taken May 24, 2020 by Jeramey Jannene.

The McGovern Park Senior Center will likely never reopen, but Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley‘s administration is trying, again, to replace it.

The senior center was closed after the basement flooded during historic storms in 2025. Even before the flooding, the senior center was in bad shape.

The administration, with support from members of the Commission on Aging, wants to build a new senior center somewhere on the city’s Northwest Side. It is asking the board for $100,000 to begin planning, but it could be three to five years before a new facility opens.

Last year, the Crowley administration attempted to partner with a private developer, Jewish Family Services (JFS), to replace the existing senior center building with a mixed-use structure containing a senior center on the first floor and affordable senior housing on floors above. Along with a federal grant, JFS would have financed the development at no cost to county taxpayers. It was supposed to be the first modern senior center designed in line with conceptual ideas created by the Commission on Aging, called MKE HUBS. The Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors voted it down because it involved building affordable housing in McGovern Park.

The McGovern Senior Center was originally built as a park pavilion in 1974. A recent assessment found it needed $1.9 million in repairs to fix it up and prevent future flooding. Assuming the county makes those fixes, it would also need to spend another $2.7 million to $3.7 million over the next five years, Aaron Hertzberg, director of the Department of Administrative Services (DAS), told the Committee on Parks and Recreation on Tuesday.

Those expenses wouldn’t lead to an expanded senior center or an improved experience. “We’re simply addressing the infrastructure that is needed to keep that facility,” he said. 

DAS officials presented supervisors with short-term and long-term alternatives for a new senior center on the city’s Northwest Side.

Short-term options involved leasing an existing building to hold senior programming and services near the park. Officials are looking at Embassy Center MKE, 3725 N. Sherman Blvd.; a vacant Goodwill facility, 6055 N. 91st St.; and Elks Lodge No. 46, 5555 W. Good Hope Rd. Build-out for a short-term senior center is estimated at approximately $465,000, and an annual lease could be roughly $165,000, according to DAS.

“I’ll be honest and frank about it, none of those solutions are great solutions,” Hertzberg said.

The administration wants to build a new facility that will provide a long-term home for the senior center. This will likely cost at least $100,000 to plan and $7 million to build. The administration would look for community partners to help the county pay for the development, similar to the deal with JFS scuttled by the board.

Potential sites include the recently vacated Aldi grocery store at 5301 N. Hopkins St. or Milwaukee Recreation‘s Browning Playfield, where Milwaukee Public Schools is planning a new community center.

“What we’re recommending is a long term solution. We should do this and we should do it the right way,” Hertzberg said.

The administration is asking the county board to release $100,000 from the board’s rainy-day account so planning work can begin. That would allow officials to begin looking for organizations to partner with and to inform the community of the plan to replace the senior center. The county would also immediately start planning deconstruction of the existing senior center, which could cost $400,000 to $700,000.

Sup. Felesia Martin‘s district includes McGovern Park, and she was one of the leading critics on the board of the deal with JFS. She expressed support for the administration’s new plan and even suggested a potential location for county officials to explore.

Sup. Sheldon Wasserman, who chairs the parks committee, and Sup. Steve Taylor both voted in favor of the deal with JFS, and they were upset at the thought of spending more money on the McGovern project when a majority of the board voted to kill the JFS project.

“McGovern Senior Center is dead. It is over with,” Wasserman said, adding that he thought the county should board up the senior center and not invest any more money in it. He even argued the county shouldn’t have spent money studying the damage from the flooding when it was already well understood the building was in poor condition.

Hertzberg responded, explaining that county government owes the public research and data when making decisions: “We don’t get to go off our guts.” He also said the administration anticipated members of the board would want to know how much it would cost to reopen McGovern.

Wasserman did suggest he was amenable to looking for a new location, but said he didn’t think the county had $7 million for a new senior center. (“We can build a mansion for $7 million.”) He pointed out that in the coming days another round of budget cuts would take effect across the Milwaukee County Transit System (MCTS).

“We’re losing transit,” he said. “We’re losing huge, more cuts are going to be made, and we’re supposed to come up with the Taj Mahal for $7 million for a specific senior center?”

Taylor said the administration should wait until next year’s budget process to ask for the planning money, and “get in line with every other deferred maintenance project out there.” With a project timeline of three to five years, there’s no reason to rush, he said.

“Frankly, it’s a bailout for a poor decision by this body, and we shouldn’t be rewarded,” he said.

Martin asked her colleagues to support the administration’s request, “so that we can move forward with a very important population. Our seniors pay their dues, and they pay their taxes in Milwaukee County.” Martin, who voted against the deal with JFS, said she told her constituents they could not have “buyer’s remorse” if the board supported them and voted down the project.

“We knew that once that decision was made, McGovern was a done deal,” Martin said. “But that is not to say that we can’t look at alternate sites.”

Denise Callaway, a member of the Commission on Aging, told supervisors some seniors can’t wait another year for the county to restart the process. The McGovern Park area has a large Black population and also a lower life expectancy relative to other areas in the county, Callaway said.

“Every day at McGovern, there were people there who were getting their blood pressure taken through a partnership that we have with the American Heart Association,” Callaway said. “There is an incredibly high level of hypertension in the Black community … there were people who found out every day that they had high blood pressure, which shortens lifespans.”

The board’s Committee on Finance will vote on the $100,000 request at a meeting later this month.

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