Supervisors Demand Transparency in Healthcare Contract Fiasco
Crowley administration shrugs off responsibility, supervisor threatens open records request.
Milwaukee County Courthouse. Photo by Graham Kilmer.
Some Milwaukee County supervisors continue to demand answers on the health care contract debacle from earlier this year.
During a meeting of the Milwaukee County Board’s Committee on Finance Thursday, supervisors Steve Taylor and Felesia Martin demanded greater explanation for how the contract covering the county’s employee health care plan was allowed to expire.
“I’m still not comfortable knowing how the hell we got here,” said Taylor, who chairs the committee. “And I said this in my email to [County Executive David Crowley] if more people need to lose their jobs, that’s fine.”
During and after the meeting, Crowley administration officials brushed off responsibility for explaining what specifically happened and who made mistakes that led to a lapse in the county’s health benefits contract, which covers the approximately $450 million employee health plan; passing off that duty to the Office of the Comptroller and saying the administration wants to look forward, not backward.
In February, county officials revealed that the Department of Human Resources (HR) had allowed the contract to lapse, leaving county employees concerned about their access to health care and putting supervisors in a position to rush through approval of a contract without independently verified financial data.
Immediately after the failure became public, the HR staffer responsible for managing the contract, Tony Maze, was fired. Since then, HR Director Margo Franklin has resigned. The county executive’s office maintains she resigned for personal reasons and was not asked to resign because of the contract debacle. Her resignation letter, however, is being withheld from the public because it is part of a personnel investigation at the county.
Administration officials, including Strategy Director Isaac Rowlett and Acting Deputy Chief of Staff Jeremy Lucas, appeared before the Finance Committee, outlining how the administration has responded to the failure since February. The administration is interviewing candidates to replace Maze, reviewing contract processes, and meeting with the county’s health benefits manager, United Healthcare, and its health benefits consultant, Willis Towers Watson.
“This is not what I asked for when we created this file,” Taylor said. “You’ve corrected a lot of the mistakes made, but we still don’t really know how the hell we got here.”
The timelines provided shortly after the contract lapse was revealed are “rank amateur at best,” Taylor said, adding that he wants to see emails and a detailed timeline showing who knew about the contract, the deadline and when they knew it.
Martin echoed Taylor’s comments.
“That’s crap to say we’re focused on the future. You can’t focus on the future if you have not understood what happened in the past,” Martin said. “And as the decision makers for this, we need to know. I’m not comfortable making decisions blindly anymore. Moving forward, when this crap happens, my vote is always going to be no.”
After the meeting, a spokesperson for Crowley reached out to Urban Milwaukee and suggested the independent comptroller should provide the detail Taylor and Martin were looking for in its audit of the county benefits program. In March, the county board passed a resolution requesting an audit of the health care benefits program.
“You should ask the Comptroller if that will be included in their audit,” the spokesperson told Urban Milwaukee.
Reached for comment, Comptroller Liz Sumner said she has already outlined the scope of the audit for the county executive’s office, and no, it does not include a detailed timeline, complete with emails or identifying which individual actors made mistakes. She even referenced the legislative language in the county board resolution, saying it appears to be asking for a systematic review of the contract process and potential failures in following it. An audit looks for systemic failures and how to fix them going forward, she said.
“So as far as the timelines are concerned, those would not be covered in the audit,” she said.
It was the comptroller’s office that flagged problems with the health care contract for county supervisors in February. The Crowley administration allowed Maze to submit the contract to the board without first explaining that it had lapsed. Sumner and her staffers took the floor at a meeting to warn supervisors about the lapse and share underlying concerns about how the project was bid out and drafted.
Former HR Director Franklin responded by releasing a timeline showing meetings between the comptroller’s office and Maze. But these were financial meetings for purposes of the 2026 budget. In reaction, Sumner told Urban Milwaukee it appeared drafted “to make my office look bad.”
After the meeting Thursday, Crowley’s aide Lucas told Taylor the timeline and documentation he was looking for could be part of the comptroller’s audit. Lucas told Urban Milwaukee he was unsure at the time whether it would be included.
“That’s good enough for me, and it can wait for the audit, if that’s going to be the case,” Taylor said.
Taylor, who works closely with the administration on major county projects like the planned $500 million courthouse, also told Urban Milwaukee he’s interested in comptroller’s role in the health care debacle, too. “I want to see the emails,” he said, ticking off names of comptroller staffers, as well as Sumner. “No one could pick up the phone and call [former HR Director] Margo Franklin. Nobody reached out to his boss ever, never once?”
Comptroller Audit Services Manager Jennifer Folliard has previously said her office never saw the full contract, only a sliver of the language relating to audits, and that Maze stonewalled them when they tried to obtain a copy of the full contract. The comptroller’s audit services division is also not traditionally tasked with managing contract deadlines. Maze’s own boss, Franklin, previously laid the blame squarely at the feet of Maze.
Unless supervisors legislate their request, it is unlikely they will receive the desired answers from the comptroller’s audit or the administration. Taylor suggested at the meeting Thursday that he’s prepared to do just that.
“I think it’d be better for you just to present it,” he said. “But I mean, how would it look if supervisors decide we need to do open records requests of the administration?”
Update: Story has been updated to reflect comment provided by Jeremy Lucas following publication.
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Clown show. He’s elected. But how does his chief of staff keep their job?
Appreciate that someone is trying to both figure out how a mistake like this could happen and hold someone accountable.
There is only so much tax money – we simply can’t afford government employees who are not able to do the job. Nothing wrong with someone being fired. I like the parks – not paying employees who don’t do their job.
Remember the retirement failure. . .
In 2001, elected officials approved a new pension plan that would pay out massive lump-sum payments to retirees, called backdrops. The payments turned some public employees into millionaires. The public fallout from the scandal led to the ouster of long-serving county executive Tom Ament, and the county’s budget has been wrecked by it ever since.
It also further complicated an already complicated pension system. A county report released in 2007, when Scott Walker was the executive, found there were $11 million in underpayments that went back to 2002. The county also discovered there were some $26 million in overpayments. Board members passed a unanimous resolution in 2007 to stop the overpayments and then never checked (nor did the Walker administration) to make sure this actually happened. It was years later, in 2014, that County Executive Chris Abele found out the county was overpaying pensions and sought to recoup the payments. Marian Ninneman, director of retirement plan services, later resigned as more errors were discovered.
In 2017, Abele requested an audit by Baker-Tilly, which found the pension system was “riddled with errors,” as Don Behm reported.
In 2018, the Abele administration proposed a reform of the pension system, and went back and forth with the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors for nearly seven months over the legislation. The stated goal of the legislation crafted by the Abele administration and shepherded through the board by former Sup. James Schmitt, was to “to improve the accuracy of benefit calculations, and to provide procedures to resolve payment errors.”
The resolution passed in 2019 codified the two options the county gives to beneficiaries of pension overpayments: waive your right to challenge the benefit correction and only pay the principle, or maintain your right to challenge and owe the county the principle plus 5% compound interest.
At the time, policymakers were deliberating over how to resolve outstanding overpayments from 185 retirees totaling approximately $1.55 million. The county had a legal obligation to correct benefit errors, then Corporation Counsel Margaret Daun told supervisors.
The legislation was supposed to fix the pension system. The primary sponsor, Schmitt, implored his colleagues to pass the legislation and “stop the bleeding,” as Mary Spicuzza reported.
Lee’s recent letter suggests the overpayments never ended. However, they have been minimized, according to a spokesperson for Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, whose office is notified when there is an overpayment or underpayment in the pension system.
“The Milwaukee County Department of Human Resources issues approximately 8,000 payments to retirees each month and 200-300 one-time payouts to exiting employees each year,” the spokesperson said. “Of those, it’s our understanding these situations occur approximately 0-2 times per year.”
Requests for comment on the scope of the county’s pension overpayments sent to Erika Bronikowski, director of retirement plan services, have not been returned.
And Crowley thinks he’s capable of running a 72 county state. He can’t even keep Milwaukee County under control.
I hope everyone thinks about that when they cast their vote in the primary gubernatorial election. Do we need an inept Milwaukee County Executive running our state?
RobertM60a3 did a great job of summarizing what county governance has done/given to its residents/voters. Nothing but scandalous and reprehensible behavior along with worthless resolutions. When one considers the sacrifices made by our past taxpayers each of these officials should be ashamed. All one needs to do is reflect on our parks and their present condition, services received from current government and the endless pleas of not having enough money to address needs. Each supervisor and department head should be removed. And those hired should be the best available based on their proven accomplishments. No new hires using the equity/diversity claim. We need smart people regardless of their ethnicity, color or gender. All male, all female, all Black, all white, all Hispanic; it doesn’t matter. As long as they can do the job.
Crowley has the nerve to run television ads in his bid for governor touting his succsses as county executive. Even a republican on life support can easily defeat this sycophant
Crowley needs to end his run for governor. The fact that he has not, after all the exposure of his lack of leadership,only goes to prove he is incapable of running the state and even incapable of running Milwaukee County.