Mayor Johnson’s budget recap
Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson released his budget this past Tuesday. This budget represents more of the same, even though he's telling us it's significantly different from last year's. Although Milwaukee has received nearly $193 million through sales tax collection, the city still faces a $87 million deficit. How is that possible?
Milwaukee made a bad deal with the state.
Milwaukee leadership, led by Mayor Johnson and County Executive David Crowley, worked with state Republicans on a deal that allowed the city and county to enact a 2% city sales tax and a .4% county sales tax respectively. In return, the city and county had to increase their police force and return a minimum of 25 School Resource Officers (SROs) to Milwaukee Public Schools, among other provisions. We’ve noted that the cost of police will always outpace inflation, which means that this deal will ultimately cost Milwaukee and its residents in the long run. We already see it in this budget. The mayor said, “Provisions of Act 12 are in force, leaving non-public safety departments to absorb, disproportionately, necessary belt-tightening.” Again, why should Milwaukee be tightening its belt with close to $200 million more in revenue?
There are no more ARPA funds to rely on.
Milwaukee received $394.2 million as part of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) in 2021. These funds were to provide “once in a generation” investment to cities recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic. However, Milwaukee used the vast majority of the funds to maintain city services. It is important to note that these resources didn’t expand city services. This is a continued trend in Milwaukee, where residents suffer because of poor decisions by elected decisions and their continued fiscal irresponsibility. The ARPA funds were supposed to be allocated with community input through a task force, with community listening sessions, but ultimately never led to community's input for fund allocation. The mayor unilaterally decided how the funds would be used in his budget, and the Common Council went along with it. This, again, was a missed opportunity for Milwaukee to fund participatory budgeting, but why did the ARPA funds need to be used to maintain service versus making a once in a generation investment in our futures?
The Milwaukee Police Department continues to bankrupt the city.
The Milwaukee Police Department continues to receive 45% of the departmental budget. Because of ACT 12 we highlighted earlier, “all departments (excepting enterprise funds and the sworn staffing sections of the police and fire departments) were asked by Mayor Cavalier Johnson in July to offer scenarios that would create 5% reductions from their cost-to-continue budget requests.”
We highlighted that police were bankrupting Milwaukee in our report in 2021, yet nothing has changed and no one has seemed to listen. Police are the only department where results or metrics don’t matter. If crime is up, we need more police; if crime is down, we need more police. This logic fails to keep us safe, and this narrative fails to acknowledge what residents need and deserve.
Since we launched LiberateMKE, residents we’ve talked to have always highlighted the need for more quality-of-life programs like housing, opportunities for young people, a solution to reckless driving (not reactive measures to reckless driving), and a lot less often the desire for more police. Yet, policing has become synonymous with safety, although year after year, generation after generation, we live out the truth that policing does not equal safety. That is not the case.
That’s why we must reject this budget and the direction of our city. We must say that we don’t want to live in a city that can’t fund the basic functions of city government, because we’ve spent all of our money on the police. We must demand that elected officials be better fiscal managers of our tax dollars and prioritize the basic needs of people over policing once and for all.
Join us as we take our demand to the Common Council on October 7 at 6:30 p.m. CT.