A local community group is again calling for federal pandemic relief funding to not go toward city of Milwaukee police coffers.
Instead, the group wants residents’ input on how the next round of American Rescue Plan Act money should be spent through a participatory budget process.
“We believe that these funds should be used to expand and improve the quality of life of people, particularly Black people of Milwaukee,” said Devin Anderson, of the African American Roundtable, a community-based advocacy group. “ …We feel like these are our funds, and we should have a direct say in how these funds are used.”
The city was allocated $394.2 million in ARPA money. The Milwaukee Common Council and then-Mayor Tom Barrett decided last year how to spend the first half of it.
The second half — totaling roughly $197 million — is expected to be in city coffers in June. A portion of that money, the group says, will go to plug budget holes.
Earlier this month, the Common Council recommended $75 million in ARPA funds be used to shore up a shortfall in the 2023 budget to maintain service levels and bolster the city’s pension liabilities, including police and fire. Mayor Cavalier Johnson initially proposed $160 million — $80 million in both 2023 and 2024 — to maintain those services.
AART and several community leaders held a news conference and rally outside the advocacy group’s northwest side office to demand the city enact participatory budgeting. That’s a democratic process allowing community residents to decide how to spend part of a public budget.
Nearly 300 reported and confirmed participatory budgeting initiatives exist at the city and county levels, including districts and wards across the U.S., according to the Participatory Budgeting Project’s website.
Enacting participatory budgeting would be a “transformative shift” for the city, said Markasa Tucker-Harris, AART’s executive director. This shift will end the status quo by allowing residents most impacted by the issues the opportunity to be a part of the decision-making process, she said.
“We know the answers to our own problems. But if we don’t have the resources that are rightfully ours to make those things happen, it is hard to address those root cause of violence and poverty,” Tucker-Harris said.
The city, Tucker-Harris added, should be better stewards of the taxpayers’ money, instead of using tricky accounting methods to fill budget holes. Continuing to put money into policing doesn’t work and hasn’t worked for centuries because people are still dying, she said.
“But yet we keep putting money into a system that isn’t addressing the reason why these kids are doing the things that they’re doing,” Tucker-Harris said. “Police don’t address the root causes. They never can and they never will.”
The police, Anderson said, take up a sizeable amount of the city’s departmental budget, about 46% and the city’s mushrooming pension problems stem from an overreliance on police. Police and fire, he added, make up 44% of the city’s active workforce, but account for 80% of the city’s pension cost. And in this year’s budget, the city’s police department is getting upwards of $280 million, Anderson said.
“The cost of policing is not allowing up to invest in any other services,” Anderson said, adding that defunding the police and using ARPA funds to invest in people is a way to “avoid austerity budgets.”
The ARPA funds, he said, could be used to address this city’s affordable housing gap, offer down payment or rental assistance, youth employment and activities, and infrastructure improvements including fixing potholes.
The first round of ARPA funding saw $26 million go to lead paint abatement, $3 million for lead abatement workforce development, and $2 million for energy efficiency upgrades to homes undergoing lead remediation.
Richard Diaz of Coalition on Lead Emergency, hopes that happens for the second round. Diaz wants ARPA funds to go toward more health outreach and engagement for children testing with high lead levels, capacity building and training for people of color business owners to do lead abatement work and the elimination of “cost shares” for service lines replacement.
Diaz said the cost to replace lead lines is passed on to the homeowners, who live in areas that have the highest lead levels but are among the poorest.
“They shouldn’t have to pay a dime,” he said.
The AART has been advocating for participatory budgeting since 2019 when it launched its LiberateMKE campaign. It has gained traction in the Common Council when nine members last year signed a resolution to supporting the initiative, but it was unfunded.
Anderson said his group will continue to target those council members. The group will host educational and outreach campaigns among residents to help pressure Common Council members. He said the aldermen must hear and be accountable to the people who elected them.
The group wants the city to allocate a portion of the ARPA dollars for each aldermanic district that will have its own participatory budgeting process.
“We see the mayor answer to downtown. He hasn’t answered to this community in the same way,” Anderson said. “That’s why we are asking district by district. We know neighborhood by neighborhood; district by district there are different priorities on what they want to see funded.”
Allison Dirr of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel contributed to this report.
La Risa Lynch is a community affairs reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Email her at llynch@gannett.com.