'Administrative screw-up' leads to Milwaukee missing deadline for $15 million police grant

Two officials in Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson’s office said Friday it wasn’t the city’s decision not to apply for a $15 million federal policing grant for 2024. Instead, it was an “administrative screw-up” that caused the city to miss the deadline to apply for the money.

However, both officials maintain that, even if the city had successfully applied and was awarded the grant — which would have paid for about 50 police officers for three years — it would have had to turn it down because of complications with a new state law over local government funding.

“We would not have accepted it because we would not have had the capacity to train them,” said Nick DeSiato, the mayor’s chief of staff. “It just does not make sense.”

Nevertheless, the application was due before the new state law went into effect. The botched submission still represents a colossal error that “we want to make sure never happens again,” said Jeff Fleming, Johnson’s spokesperson. “It was entirely unacceptable.”

The news was first reported by Mark Belling of News/Talk 1130 WISN-AM radio.

DeSiato said a “very seasoned” civilian employee within the Milwaukee Police Department is the subject of an internal investigation to determine what happened with the application.

Heather Hough, the police department’s chief of staff, declined comment, citing the open investigation.

DeSiato and Fleming said the employee attempted to submit the grant electronically within hours of the deadline in mid-May, but failed to complete the submission and missed the deadline due to a technical issue.

The city “exerted a significant amount of resources” to get an extension, DeSiato said. That included reaching out to Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s office, but the effort failed.

Why the employee waited within hours to submit the application is one angle of the Police Department’s internal investigation, DeSiato and Fleming said.

The COPS grant is a program through the U.S. Department of Justice that provides funding directly to law enforcement agencies to hire officers. The city has been awarded money under the program the last two years.

But Wisconsin’s new local funding law — written by Republicans in the state Legislature and signed into effect in June by Gov. Tony Evers — throws a wrench in funding officers with grants, DeSiato and Fleming said.

The law requires Milwaukee to maintain the number of police officers and the daily staffing level in the fire department minimally at the numbers from the previous year ― excluding any who are in state- or grant-funded positions.

The law also requires that, within 10 years, the city must employ at least 1,725 officers. For 2023, it has funding for 1,630 positions.

On Tuesday, Johnson released his proposed $1.9 billion 2024 budget, which included taxpayer funding for three police recruit classes, each with 65 officers.

That's the maximum number of recruits and classes that Milwaukee’s police academy can train in a year, according to DeSiato, who has previously served as chief of staff for the Milwaukee Police Department.

If 50 of those recruits were grant-funded, the city would have fallen behind on its state-mandated benchmarks for staffing, DeSiato said.

If the city doesn't maintain police and fire staffing services according to the law, the penalties are large. Milwaukee would lose 15% of its state revenue. Based on the total shared revenue the city expects to receive in 2024, the loss would total about $36 million, according to city officials.

DeSiato said the law has a “material negative impact to support public safety,” which he said is one of Johnson’s highest priorities. “This limitation extensively and long-term discourages using COPS grants to expand our police force.”

Johnson and Budget Director Nik Kovac were asked about the COPS grant earlier this week by the Journal Sentinel but they did not mention the botched application. They instead focused their comments only on how the new state law offers a "disincentive" for applying for such grants.

The law "provides a disincentive to apply for future COPS grants, which we are not doing in this year's budget," Kovac said.

Johnson then added: "We've applied for COPS grants in the past because prior to (the passage of the law), at least, it made sense for us to do that and allow the federal government to cover the costs for three years. But now there's some disincentive for doing that."

Contact Elliot Hughes at elliot.hughes@jrn.com or 414-704-8958. Follow him on Twitter @elliothughes12.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Milwaukee missed deadline for $15 million police grant due to 'screw-up'