The Milwaukee Common Council's powerful finance committee on Thursday recommended stashing away tens of millions more toward the city's pension and hiring 195 officers to limit the drop in the Police Department's sworn strength.
Mayor Tom Barrett presented a $1.75 billion proposed 2022 budget last month. The 15-member council will take up amendments and adopt the budget on Nov. 5.
Ald. Michael Murphy, who chairs the Finance and Personnel Committee, said the most significant amendments were to put aside $30 million more to ease the expected spike in the city's pension contribution in 2023 and to allocate $6 million to hire the police officers.
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"I feel that's extremely important when we have clearance rates that are dropping so precipitously, and people forget that citizens if they feel the justice system doesn't work they start taking it into their own hands, and that's a recipe for chaos," Murphy said.
The consternation from previous years over whether to approve police positions was notably toned down, with committee members voting overwhelmingly to recommend funding the 195 officer positions.
Members cited the influx of federal funds to the city in addition to the reverberations of the sustained violent crime and the dropping clearance rate in the lives of residents. They also acknowledged, though, that it would take time before the new officers would be on the street.
The committee also highlighted efforts to address public safety through more than a police response and called for a multi-faceted approach to addressing violence.
If approved by the council, the 195 officer positions would mean that the department would still lose about two dozen positions, dropping sworn strength to 1,657 on average over the course of the year, according to city estimates.
The move follows the decrease of 120 officer positions in the 2021 budget and 60 positions in 2020 by not replacing people who had left the department.
"We may have to cut this severely down the road. ... but if we're going to reinvent the way we do public safety we have to actually reinvent it," Ald. Nik Kovac said.
Ald. Milele Coggs abstained from the vote while her four colleagues voted to recommend the spending to the council.
Coggs said her decision was the result of concerns over the long-term cost of the officers but also information that council members do not yet have, including an outstanding study on the appropriate police staffing level and recommendations from a task force that is looking at alternatives to policing in certain circumstances.
"I totally understand residents' desire to feel safe and their desire for more police, but I also think there are a lot of outstanding prevention and intervention things that we have going on right now that need the opportunity to have impact before I can make a decision for such a long-term fiscal impact for the city," she said.
But there's a shared desire, she said, between residents who want more police and those who do not: "People just want to feel safe."
Barrett's budget proposal included $6 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act funds for three police recruit classes, but the council declined to use the federal pandemic aid for police.
Instead, council members approved legislation that increased the federal funding for the Fire Department to free up tax dollars for the officer positions - but only if a council budget amendment were to provide the alternate funding.
Common Council President Cavalier Johnson put in a budget amendment to fund the police positions and said he changed the funding source in response to council members and community groups that did not want to see the federal funds used for police.
The LiberateMKE campaign has called for moving $75 million from the Police Department to public health and housing and not using American Rescue Plan Act funding for the Police Department.
Johnson said Thursday that council members were listening to the "vast majority of people in the city of Milwaukee."
"We want to make sure that our constituents, the ones who are active, engaged in their neighborhoods who are calling for (police) service are not sitting and waiting for hours in order to get that service," he said. "And so, council members have paid attention to that. We've paid attention as well to some of the other voices, as I mentioned prior, calling for us not to use relief dollars on this and to find another funding source."
He said he was confident the funding would be approved by the full council next week.
Committee members also sought to highlight steps taken to change public safety in the city and be responsive to residents, including funding the police recruits with tax dollars instead of ARPA, putting federal funds toward the city's Office of Violence Prevention and housing, and more.
Ald. JoCasta Zamarripa said it is important to fund a variety of initiatives to address violence in the community.
"I just don't want especially those young people that we are seeing become so civically engaged on this issue, I hope that they don't think it fell on deaf ears because it has not," she said.
In an acknowledgment of the serious financial problems the city is likely to experience due to its pension obligation, the committee set aside another $30 million to help lessen the impact in the years to come.
The funds would bring the total contribution to the city's pension reserve fund for 2022 to $40 million.
Similar to the police officer funding, the contribution to the fund was made possible by substituting $30 million in the Fire Department budget with ARPA funds, freeing up tax dollars to put toward the pension.
Johnson said he hoped the allocation would show state legislators that Milwaukee is taking its fiscal problems seriously and encourage those at the state to provide much-needed relief for the city.
"We understand the dire financial straits that we're in, but we also understand that the only entity that can help us to actually solve these these problems in a meaningful way without severe and deep service cuts is the state government," Johnson said.
And in a sign of things to come, Ald. Robert Bauman proposed a $2.9 million drop in the Fire Department's budget, the equivalent of two firehouses.
Although the measure was not recommended by the committee, it raised the specter of budget deliberations to come if the pension obligation is not addressed.
"It's like the law of gravity: You can't avoid it. ... Sooner or later you're going to see massive cuts to the Milwaukee Fire Department, and yes the personnel that are left are going to be really tired and overworked, but that's the reality we're facing."
Contact Alison Dirr at 414-224-2383 or adirr@jrn.com. Follow her on Twitter @AlisonDirr.
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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Milwaukee finance committee recommends $30 million for pension, $6 million for 195 police officers