Milwaukee council to try to override veto blocking $400K for blight removal

The Milwaukee Common Council plans on Tuesday to take up a budget veto that Mayor Tom Barrett used to block a $400,000 increase for blight removal.

Council members are in the final stretch of working on the city’s 2020 budget and will consider eight vetoes Barrett issued last week. Among them is a veto that blocked a budget amendment that would have pulled $400,000 from the mayor’s 10,000 Homes Initiative, which is meant to make housing more affordable by building and remodeling homes over the next decade. The Common Council needs 10 votes to override Barrett’s veto.

The money was part of $600,000 that council members took out of the $1 million the 10,000 Homes Initiative had originally been provided in the city budget. Besides the $400,000 for blight elimination, the transfer put $200,000 toward the city’s Housing Trust Fund, which provides loans to rebuild or rehab homes.

This is not the first time the common council and the mayor have found themselves at odds over these matters. Last year, the council overrode a mayoral veto that would have taken $1.5 million from the city’s deconstruction program, which required contractors to take apart homes instead of simply demolishing them.

When Barrett issued his veto this time around, he said the 10,000 Homes program, which he introduced in 2018, is on track to meet its goal of building or redeveloping 10,000 homes in the city. “More than 500 families have been able to move to new and renovated affordable housing units,” according to Barrett’s veto message.

Barrett also noted that there’s $1.2 million available for deconstruction through next year and that his proposed budget will set aside $1.8 million for blight removal, which can be used for mechanical demolitions, too.

But during a council meeting in early November, Alderman Bob Bauman said the program had yet to use any of the money it had been awarded in 2019 and had no plans to do so next year. His amendment would take $400,000 out of the 10,000 Homes Initiative and transfer it to the Housing Trust Fund and then put the same amount into the city’s blight elimination efforts. The Common Council approved the amendment 14-0.

“We get a lot of complaints in our neighborhood about blighted buildings, about fire damaged buildings,” Bauman said. “They are driving down property values. They ave a very negative impact on the look of a neighborhood. The 10K homes initiative basically has no plan.”

Despite having its first deconstruction job earlier this month, Milwaukee has a long backlog of blighted homes that have to be dealt with. The number of properties on the list only grew under Milwaukee’s deconstruction policy, which required nearly all dilapidated homes in the city to be taken apart instead of demolished.

After the policy was adopted two years ago, blight removal ground to a halt. Milwaukee’s list of blighted homes went from having 380 properties on it to more than 500 by the end of 2018 — the first year of the city’s deconstruction policy. City officials pressed pause on the deconstruction policy earlier this year, allowing mechanical demolitions to continue alongside deconstruction projects.

The city also recently awarded a $1.2 million contract to Spencer Renovation & Construction to deconstruct 50 homes in the city in the next few months. Follow @natebeck9