Measure to let Milwaukee residents decide how to spend $600,000 of city budget advances, heads to full council

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01-04-2025

The Milwaukee advocacy group African American Roundtable has long pushed for the city's government to adopt participatory budgeting — allowing residents to decide how to spend part of a budget.
It moved closer to that goal Monday.
The Common Council's Finance and Personnel Committee unanimously backed legislation that includes money for participatory budgeting. The full council is expected to take up the measure Wednesday.
'It's obviously been a long, long time coming for us,' Devin Anderson, AART's campaign and membership director, said.
'To even get it to the Finance and Personnel Committee is really an exciting step for us. People have been asking and we've been demanding participatory budgeting for years. We are just really excited … about the possibility of this being a thing.'
The resolution allocates $600,000 for a resident-led community budgeting program, which includes funding to establish a steering committee to oversee the program.
The money would come from the $2.4 million Council-Led Transformational Fund meant to be spent on programs that "uplift the residents of Milwaukee and transform the community by strengthening support to residents most in need," according to budget documents.The resolution also includes funding for these and other programs:
$100,000 for Hanan Refugees Relief Group for refugee services
$75,000 to Diverse and Resilient for violence and homelessness prevention services
$50,000 to Teens Grow Greens for urban agriculture apprenticeship programs
$50,000 to Friendship Circle of Wisconsin for suicide prevention training
$15,000 for wage increases for City of Milwaukee Earn & Learn participants
$300,000 to finance housing rehabilitation projects in the Metcalfe Park community
The Transformational Fund spending has been a long time coming for one of the legislation's main co-sponsors, Ald. Milele Coggs.
Discussions of getting residents to weigh in on budget spending date to the city's ARPA Funding Allocation Task Force. The then-group was tasked in 2023 with getting resident input on how to use the city's remaining money from the American Rescue Plan Act. The Transformational Fund's money comes from the ARPA funding.
Coggs said she never lost sight of what residents said was important to them.
"This is just one other opportunity to make sure that we are using resources to address some of the concerns residents have brought to us," she said.
Ald. JoCasta Zamarripa called the allocation of these funds a "love letter" to city residents.
"This is our investment in the people of the city of Milwaukee," she said. "This expresses our commitment to the people of the city of Milwaukee."
Ald. Scott Spiker expressed some reservations about allocating $2.4 million if there's a budget shortfall. But the legislation, he said, funds many good programs, some of which are urgent.
'I do have concerns about what we potentially are giving up," Spiker said. 'That's not something anybody can solve without a crystal ball.'
AART's Anderson is confident the Common Council will pass the participatory budgeting measure.
Milwaukee wouldn't be the first Wisconsin city to use participatory budgeting. That title goes to Eau Claire, which in 2020 did one phase of grants, limited due to funding constraints.
Across the U.S., nearly 300 participatory budgeting initiatives exist at the city and county levels, according to the Participatory Budgeting Project's website.
If it passes in Milwaukee, it'll take several months to get the initiative started. The process includes establishing a steering committee that would include both residents and city officials, and setting up voting eligibility and project parameters. Anderson said the steering committee will have purview on what projects are eligible for funding.
'Having the money there is one thing,' he said. 'We want to make sure that this process can engage as many residents as possible, to make sure that we are reaching all residents in all parts of the city to have them engaged and participate in this.'
AART has long pushed to devote fewer city dollars on policing. But a 2023 state law known as Act 12 puts the city at risk of losing funding if it doesn't increase its police staffing to state-imposed levels.
'With this $500,000, we really want to prioritize other ways we can improve our communities that don't include funding the police anymore,' Anderson said.
The effort to get the city to adopt participatory budgeting came in fits and starts over the last six years.
AART first proposed the concept in 2019 through its Liberate MKE campaign. The campaign sought to divert funds from the Milwaukee Police Department to community programs. A 2019 proposal aimed to create a $100,000 participatory budget pilot giving residents input on city violence prevention funds for the 2020 budget before being withdrawn.
During the pandemic, the group made several pushes to allocate some of the city's federal pandemic aid from the American Rescue Plan Act or ARPA money to fund community programs through participatory budgeting.
'All of those moments were unsuccessful, but we continued to keep the momentum,' Anderson said.
AART even went as far as to front its own money to educate people about how participatory budgeting works. The group had residents propose projects and then vote on which one would share in $40,000 in grant money. Four community-led projects got $10,000 grants each.
The effort, Anderson said, showed what's possible when funding resident-driven projects and trusting them to decide as well as execute programs that help their communities.
'Organizing works,' he said.
Anderson said it also shows what can happen when the government makes people part of the process, instead of excluding them.
'I think we are in a time where people feel like government is not working for more and more folks," he said. "This is an opportunity to empower residents."
La Risa Lynch is a community affairs reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Email her at [e-mail]
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Milwaukee participatory budgeting measure advances to full Council