Courthouse Proud!

On Saturday, July 6, there was a massive fire at the Milwaukee County Courthouse which started when the very old and out of code electrical infrastructure started on fire.  Since the fire, Milwaukee County Emperor Chris Abele has been doing his best to control the message and the spin so that people don't focus on the cost of the clean up and repairs, the risk he is putting people in by opening parts of the courthouse too soon and the fact that the fire stemmed from his deferred maintenance and willful failure to replace the faulty equipment even though he had been warned of the danger.

While Abele is trying to come off as transparent and working real hard to fix the problem, there are things that he is omitting, besides the fact that he is responsible for the damage and added expense to the taxpayers.
Some of the highlights he somehow fails to mention include:

• People involved in the risk management field have said that if the fire had occurred at any other time than a holiday weekend, people would have probably died,
• Abele's Director of Risk Management, Cindy van Pelt, was on vacation starting the day before the fire and did not return until July 18th,
• The electrical equipment was known to easily overheat and they had large industrial fans blowing on it to keep it from overheating, and
• When Abele directed the Child Support Enforcement workers back to the courthouse, it was before their work area was clean.  The area was sooty, smoky and filled with dead roaches.  Workers were sent home for another day off with pay.

But now the hapless Abele has managed to make a bad situation for himself even worse.

It is being reported that Abele is launching a PR move called "Courthouse Proud." The idea was supposedly to recognize the public and private sector workers who toiled day and night to try to get the courthouse operational again.

But Abele has a few problems surrounding what should be a no-brainer thing.

First of all, the design he asked for could be an copyright infringement:

The "Courthouse Proud" logo features four blue upraised fists and forearms as pillars on the courthouse against a red background.

The much publicized and widely reprinted blue fist on "Stand with Wisconsin" posters during the 2011 battle over collective bargaining at the Capitol has just one clenched fist, blue against a red background.

David Eisner, contract administrator for District Council 48 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said the banner and shirts won't sit well with many employees.

Abele is "trying to distract or distort the real issue and make it into kind of a pep rally thing," Eisner said. The courthouse's aging electrical infrastructure should have been maintained better so the fire didn't happen, he said.

"It's a buncha crap, that's what I say," said Eisner.

No cause of the fire has been established yet, according to county officials.

As for the blue fist image: "It is a little different, but it's a blue fist," Eisner said. "Is (Abele) starting a union of his own?" He questioned whether the use of the blue fist for the banner and shirts might infringe on the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations' "Stand with Wisconsin" imagery.

That alone stinks to high heaven. But is always the case when it comes to all things Abele, there's more. There's always more (emphasis mine):

The courthouse fist image was put together by staff at Laughlin Constable in response to a request from Don Tyler, the county's director of administrative services. Both Steve Laughlin and Tyler have served on the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra Board.

The design work was done at no charge, said Evan Zeppos, a managing partner at the Laughlin firm.

[...]

The T-shirts were parceled out to those most heavily involved in cleanup efforts, Conway said. A tally of who got the 266 shirts distributed so far included staff from eight county departments, as well as workers from We Energies and two private contractors.

Conway said there were still some left over, but those are "somewhat spoken for," he said.

"You've got to earn it," he said.

In this little blurb, Abele has made a complete mockery of the county's Code of Ethics (Chapter 9).

The Standards of Conduct (Chapter 9.05) make it explicitly clear that no county official or employee can take or give anything of value or solicit for anything of value.

Yet we have Abele sending his Director of Administration to ask for a logo design which he gets free of charge.  Abele then turns around and starts doling out these t-shirts to those who "earn it."

Just about everything about his PR stunt has the potential to be illegal and actionable.

The fire might be out, but it doesn't look like anything is about to cool off anytime soon.

Silent No More

Last Wednesday, the Milwaukee County Board's Health and Human Needs Committee held a meeting. It was already going to be a lengthier meeting with ten items to take up. Furthering to the length, a few of the items were rather controversial and needed a lot of discussion.

One of the lengthier topics was the closing of one of the county's two crisis respite centers. The executive director of Community Advocates, Joe Volk, had some choice words to say about it. His agency is the one that had been running the center:

The director of a now-closed Crisis Resource Center on Milwaukee's north side blasted county officials Wednesday for ending the agency's contract for a program meant to divert patients from the Mental Health Complex.

Joe Volk, executive director of Community Advocates, said his program had succeeded in caring for its clients but failed to accomplish all the bureaucratic requirements.

Based on the county's action to terminate the Community Advocates' $850,000 contract, "you'd think we had sexual assaults and patients with broken necks," Volk said. "And that we might even have people beating each other up many, many times."

The remark was a sarcastic reference to problems that have been noted by state and federal inspectors at the county's inpatient programs at the complex.

"The reality is we had none of that," Volk said at a meeting of the County Board's Health and Human Needs Committee. He said county officials wanted the Crisis Resource Center to be operated like a miniature version of the Mental Health Complex. Community Advocates instead offered "cutting edge service" that was praised by clients, Volk said.

The skinny on this is that Milwaukee County Emperor Chris Abele kept changing the conditions of the contract in order to have a reason to fire Community Advocates and give the contract to the Milwaukee Center for Independence, who has been getting an inordinately large percentage of the county's business. It's been reported that this one issue took up almost two hours as Volk got into a give and take with Abele's staffers.

The saddest part is that, due to Act 14 - the Plutocracy Law, there wasn't anything the Board could do. But at least it's now on record that Abele's power grab wasn't about efficiency or best practice, but on favoritism and cronyism.

The other big topic was the closure of the mental health complex.

Emperor Abele is in a hurry to close the mental health complex so that he can sell the land that the complex sits on to his land developer friends in the Greater Milwaukee Commission before the value of the land climbs any higher.

In order to force the moving of the patients of the complex out into the community, Abele is promising that there will be a ton of community services to help them, even though he knows better.  As mentioned above, he is forcing a respite crisis home to close.  He's also cut services for a whole group of people getting help at the ACCESS Clinic.

Furthermore, there are not facilities that have sufficient resources to keep the patients of the complex or other safe.  And if there is a facility that would be able to keep everyone safe, the cost of such services is much more than Family Care is willing to pay.

This all came to light during the meeting. The following is a prepared report which was presented to the committee by Dave Eisner of AFSCME District Council 48, which represents many of the staff at the mental health complex:

The proposed 2014 Departmental Budget of BHD has now been released. Plans are to place 24 clients from Rehab Center-Central into community-based settings by July 1, 2014. The Center for Independence and Development (formerly Hilltop) is expected to close in 2014 by placing all of its 48 residents in community based settings by November 1, 2014.

As of June 12, 2013, the Center for Independence and Development (formerly Hilltop) has placed 8 clients into community based settings. 2 of these clients have returned to BHD, 1 back to CIDS and 1 to Acute Care. The 2013 Adopted Budget called for 12 clients to be placed into the community by April 1, 2013 and an additional 12 clients to be placed by July 1, 2013 from the Center for Independence and Development. So out of the goal of 24 client placements by July 1, 2013, six (6) have been placed.

It has been observed and reported that Rehab Central patients who have been placed into the community are returning to BHD through the Psych Emergency (PCS) and are ending up in Acute Care. That raises the question as to how those placements are then counted?

The apparent lack of success in placements into community settings and the limited amount of placements does not bode well for BHD's optimistic plans in their 2014 Budget request.

It has been reported to us that there is a severe shortage of proper group homes and appropriate facilities to send residents to, in the community, contrary to what Administration has been reporting. Many of the residents are scared. The majority of them have no family support.

We are hearing that Long-Term placements where clients have been inpatients at BHD for decades are having problems. There are supposed to be visits and transition done over a period of time to be able to acclimate the clients to a community setting and to community staff. This is not occurring and clients are just being placed. This uncertainty has heightened some of the clients behaviors and is causing them much anxiety.

We are hearing that Guardians are upset also. Because this is being approached as a closure and not a downsizing, the Guardians have no choice in the placement of their wards.

All of this information has been reported to us by staff who work at BHD.

While it is recognized that reforms are needed at BHD, we strongly urge you as policymakers for Milwaukee County to thoughtfully review all aspects of this plan, and to proceed with an approach that provides high quality care, treatment, and safety for all patients, includes Guardians and front-line staff at BHD in the discussion, and that whatever is ultimately decided should be done in a cautious manner with achievable results.

It should be noted that the only issue that Abele's people argued out of all of these statements was the number of patients returning to BHD or being shuffled around. Supervisor Peggy Romo West, Chairwoman of the Committee, quickly shut that down, stating that she had received independent emails from different people saying similar things. She said that it's not clear what it was yet, but something negative was happening at the complex.

There was no denial that patients were being placed recklessly or that there was a severe shortage of available facilities and resources to meet the needs of these vulnerable adults.

Yet this is what Abele wants to do to these poor people.

The reason these facts are significant is that in his lust for austerity, Abele is cutting the number of staff for BHD in his 2014 budget, working on the false presumption that enough people will be safely placed in the community so he can go about laying off workers.  But he's as close to his goal of people out as his hero Scott Walker is at creating jobs.  And without enough workers to care for the people who have not moved out or have returned, there will be an increase in mandated overtime, which is already mind-boggling huge.  And as it  has been repeatedly shown throughout the years, this increase in mandatory overtime can cause all sorts of problems, including an increase in attacks by patients, an increase in people being hurt and mistakes being made which can have grave consequences.

One of the main reasons for this happening is that as Abele made his grandiose plans to shut down the complex, the group commissioned to plan and implement this closure consisted mostly of Abele's administration and the profiteers who just wanted to feed on a new trough of cash.  One of the groups most noticeable by their absence were the workers, the front line people that do this work day in and day out and knows what will work and what won't, regardless of the results of all of the studies Abele and GMC commission the Public Policy Forum to do to get their desired results.

In response to this neglectful omission, the leadership of Local 170, which represents the caregivers at the complex, had gathered 116 signatures - and not just from their local, but others as well, including nurses and non-union members - in just a few days, asking the Board to come to BHD and see how things really are for themselves and to listen to the workers.

The following is a prepared statement from the officers of Local 170:

Local 170 represents over 200 front-line caregivers who provide care for our community's most vulnerable citizens.

Working conditions at BHD are difficult. State and Federal Surveyors are constantly in the buildings and BHD is attempting to become accredited. The former Administrator [Kathleen Eilers - who had just been rejected by the County Board for her poor performance] put out a memo last month threatening to discipline staff as a result of State findings. The same Administrator at Town Hall Meetings advised staff that the closure was a done deal and if they didn't like it to find other jobs. Many staff took her up on it and left. This has resulted in staff shortages and mandatory overtime/double shifts. A private concern has been hired to provide a Nursing Pool for Rehab Central. There are 19 vacant part-time CNA positions that are not being filled that could offer some relief. Morale is low.

Quality care is a challenge under these conditions created by Administration. Closure and placing our patients into community care is being planned by the County Executive and he has brought many people into the process, but the front-line caregivers have been left out. Too much is at stake in our community. The workers have decided that they will be silent no more.

Many wanted to be here today, but because of staff shortages and Mandatory overtime were unable to attend. We are submitting a petition signed by 116 of our co-workers requesting this Committee schedule listening sessions at BHD to hear the employees concerns. Thank you.

It is my understanding that Supervisors Russell Stamper and David Bowen have tentatively agreed to hold these meetings to find out what is really going on at BHD instead of relying on the dishonest Abele for their information.  The only thing Abele wants from the workers is their signature on a pink slip.

What really brings this all home is the fact that Meg Kissinger of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel just came out with a four-part article regarding the struggles one family is having with the inadequate community-based support system that Abele is trying to tell people is all we need. Adding to the irony of the timing is the fact that the case manager in the story is from Milwaukee Center for Independence, the same agency that Abele is contracting with for the majority of services.

The end game of all of this is that if Abele continues on his amoral, irresponsible course, there will be hundreds, if not thousands, of people in the community receiving inadequate services, and presenting a danger to themselves or to others. After several contacts with police and various psychiatric service agencies, many of these people will end up in jail, in prison, in state institutions or, worst of all, dead.  These are prices in both the human and the fiscal sense that we should not have to take on, especially when it is all for the money grubbing of some of Abele's closest cronies.