When he came to office, Johnson and Milwaukee faced a myriad of problems, including a large structural deficit and enough problems with homicides and other crimes to make public safety the centerpiece of his campaign.
The numbers have gotten better on both those fronts. Governing sat down with Johnson in his City Hall office to talk about the progress he made, as well as the continuing difficulties involved in running a major city in the post-pandemic era.
This interview has been edited.
Governing: You came into office facing a major structural deficit but you managed, along with County Executive David Crowley, to convince the Legislature to allow Milwaukee and other localities to raise your sales taxes. What difference has that made for the city’s finances?
Johnson: That's what I campaigned on having, and we did it. We were in Madison a lot but it was all worth it. This was a decades-in-the-making financial crisis that was going to affect the city, and I knew that if I were fortunate enough to be elected mayor, that it had to be priority No. 1 to resolve.
We're in a position right now with our sales tax where we have exceeded projections. I think last year, it was over $200 million that our sales tax collected. We were able to take those dollars to support increasing law enforcement, to growing our fire department again, which had been shrinking over the course of last number of years, and then also making investments in our pension system, which has also caused us some challenges over the years as well.
(Alan Greenblatt/Governing)
It's not uncommon for police contracts in this city to be late, but it’s gotten kind of nasty and personal. Can you talk about how that situation is looking?
When you look back at the last time the police got a raise, it was in my administration. We worked it out with them. You look at the contract negotiations that are happening right now, we're working with the Milwaukee Police Association, the rank and file officers, but we already settled contracts with the police supervisor's organization. We've already settled a contract with the firefighter's union, so it's not as if I'm not interested in working to resolve contracts, or my administration is not. We've done it, and I'm interested in doing it now.
The police association president is saying that he wants a raise for officers that's nearly 13 percent. Well, we're offering a 9 percent raise, so they would still get a considerable bump here.
When you first ran, public safety was your mantra. We followed you out to the scene of a triple homicide. The numbers have gotten better but aren’t consistently dropping, while people are nervous about coming downtown. Can you talk about continuing problems with perceptions about safety and disorder?
We've seen success with the application of accountability and prevention, my two-pronged public safety strategy in Milwaukee. The numbers are improving. If you look at crime overall from the last time we had our report out to a year before that, crime is down 17 percent in the city; from the time that I was elected mayor in 2022 it’s down 25 percent. So we're making some really, really good progress in Milwaukee.
I think it continues to take work to get that message out to people. It's difficult when you turn on the news [and see crimes]. I would imagine it's the same in every media market, but it’s easy to report on crimes. The police have already set the scene for you. There's tape up and the sirens and the lights are flashing. All you have to do is stick a reporter there with a microphone and a camera and boom, that's your story, right? It's easy, but it's not so easy to go and dig up a story about something positive that happened.
It worries citizens, when the media portrays it as if their neighborhood is in constant danger or their city’s in constant carnage, when the fact of the matter is that there are way more positive things that happen here than what they are showing every night on television.
Schools are often a problem for big city mayors. Often performance is lacking, and you need schools to be successful to have a successful city, but basically, you have no control over them. You’ve been having the superintendent come to cabinet meetings. Can you talk about what you're doing to help the school district?
I want to grow the population of the city of Milwaukee and I know that people aren't going to choose Milwaukee if they don't feel like they can put their kids in a quality school for their education. So that's something that's central and important to me. The superintendent, probably for the first time in Milwaukee's history, is a member of the mayor's cabinet. She joins in our cabinet meetings in an ex-officio capacity.
We have consistent, steady meetings. In fact, I'm meeting with her later today, just so we keep that relationship up and running. We're clued in to what each other is doing and trying to figure out ways in which the city can support the school district and vice versa, because all the kids in the city are my kids.
How are things going for you at this point with President Donald Trump? Obviously, what Washington does has an effect.
Quite frankly, there's an impact everywhere, whether you're in government, whether you're in the nonprofit sector, whether you're in the for-profit sector, everybody tends to rely on some certainty, and the hallmark of this president is to keep people guessing. That's how he likes to operate.
But there are spaces where we can work together and I'm interested in doing that if it means the betterment of the city of Milwaukee. The police union’s president has talked about bringing in the National Guard. That's his solution. I say no to that solution, especially when it's just, you know, people doing donuts in the middle of the street. You don't call the military in for that.
Historically, the city has worked with Washington on task force operations, with our police department, along with the FBI, the ATF, U.S. Marshals to pull criminals off the street. I want criminals pulled off the street, too. We should do things like that.
The federal government can help us by supporting housing programs. We could work with the federal government to create more job opportunities, to further create stability in neighborhoods, getting people away from the potential of going into crime. So there are a number of ways in which we can work together. We just had some pretty terrible flooding in Milwaukee just last month. The president approved aid, and I'm grateful for that.
So there are spaces where we can work together but if it's not the right decision for Milwaukee, then I just say no.
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