Milwaukee County needs to secure more than $200 million to build a new criminal courthouse to replace its decaying Safety Building in downtown Milwaukee, according to a new report from the Public Policy Forum.
While the Safety Building replacement project is currently in the planning phase, financing has yet to be determined.
Paying for the new building will be difficult considering the county’s wide-range of capital needs for its other buildings, parks, cultural intuitions and transit system.
The Safety Building project “could exhaust virtually all of the county’s borrowing capacity for several consecutive years,” according to the report. “While county officials hope to identify alternative means of financing the project, it is difficult to see how that can happen in a manner that will not require the county either to borrow more than it can reasonably afford, or to exacerbate its decades-long practice of deferring other capital improvement needs.”
The report, which is the third in the forum’s five-part series looking at local government infrastructure, looked at several city and county structures including City Hall and the Milwaukee County Courthouse, Milwaukee Police Administration building, the county’s Criminal Justice Facility, and the county’s Mental Health Complex.
“These buildings are important not only for the public services they house, but also because their proper care and improvement impacts the ability of each government to spend capital dollars on quality-of-life assets like museums and parks, and on the transportation, water, and wastewater assets that are critical to our region’s economy and public health,” the report said.
In addition to the Safety Building, the report found the Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex in Wauwatosa and the Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s office downtown, should be fully replaced as soon as possible.
“The three buildings are similar in that the need for full replacement has been known for some time,” the report states. “Planning for new buildings is proceeding, but decisions have been delayed because of financial constraints and uncertainty as to whether and how replacement should occur. In the meantime, necessary repair work on the existing buildings has been deferred pending decisions on replacement, thus creating an even more urgent need to act.”
Even if replacement of the dilapidated buildings does not take place, the county should more than double its spending on building related projects in 2018, from $12 million to $24 million and almost quadruple it to $45 million in 2019, according to the report.
The report also cites ongoing repairs to City Hall and the Milwaukee Police Department’s Administration Building as the city’s most pressing building projects. Those projects are currently underway with funding plans largely in place.
The city has spent $60 million through tax levy-support borrowing in its capital budget over the last two years on a foundation repair project at City Hall.
“On the whole, other major city buildings appear to be in reasonable condition, with the exception of the Municipal Services Building in the Menomonee Valley and two Department of Public Works garages,” the report found.
The city has also struggled to secure capital resources needed to complete projects.
“For now, the prospects look reasonable (for the city), but the emergence of expensive new projects in the next five years and continued deferral of basic repair needs could modify that assessment,” the report says.
