Rotary honors Rob Henken’s quest to deliver ‘just the facts’
Rob Henken was in for a bumpy ride when he arrived in Milwaukee in 1994 to lead the Alliance for Future Transit, a group that sought to make the case for light rail.
Just two months on the job, Henken was derided in a letter to the editor in the Milwaukee Sentinel as “an eastcoast carpetbagger” who sneered at light rail skeptics “as uninformed, unwashed masses.”
The reader sure got that wrong.
Henken, president of the Wisconsin Policy Forum, may have come here by way of Boston and Washington, D.C., but he has long been part of the fabric of life in Milwaukee.
He’s a backstage player, a nonpartisan policy analyst who strives to deliver “just the facts” on key public policy issues.
On Tuesday, he’ll be honored as the Rotary Club of Milwaukee 2019 Person of the Year.
In a Rotary video celebrating Henken, commercial real estate broker James T. Barry III said when he was the forum’s board chair there was a joke that “if Rob didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him.”
Never far from a calculator
Henken, 55, is a policy wonk at heart, never far from a calculator.
He has worked for Republicans and Democrats and in the public interest. And he has run the policy forum since 2008.
“I can tell you with all certainty that I’m the only person who has worked for the chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party and Scott Walker,” Henken said during a recent interview.
Look around his downtown office and you see a blend of the professional and the personal, from manila folders jammed with documents to photos documenting the life of a tight-knit family.
He and his wife, Barrie, a Milwaukee native, met as graduate school students in Washington, D.C.
Two of Henken’s passions are public policy and baseball and the couple’s two sons are following in those footsteps — Danny works for the Milwaukee Brewers while Ben works at a think tank, the Pew Research Center.
He may now call Milwaukee home but he hasn’t totally given up on Boston. Henken is a lifelong Red Sox fan and even managed to take in a World Series game in 2007, in the height of Milwaukee County budget season. He flew out in the afternoon, got to a bleacher seat by the first pitch and flew back to Milwaukee in the early morning in time for a key meeting.
In his career, Henken has been a staffer for two Democratic congressmen and spent nearly 10 years in Milwaukee County government, first as director of research for the County Board before working for then-County Executive Walker. He was director of health and human services and later director of administrative services.
That long-ago stint with the Alliance for Future Transit left him a little bruised but unbowed. Amid acrimonious debate, the light rail project never got on track.
He said he learned a lot of lessons from that chapter of his life.
“If anything, it made me want to work harder to try to make sure that complicated, emotional public policy decisions are at least grounded in some true, factual information,” he said.
‘I’m a problem solver’
For someone who has been around politics for decades, Henken said he’s not a political person. People have urged him to run for office, he said, but he prefers being a behind-the-scenes researcher and adviser.
“I’m a problem solver,” he said. “My yearning to be in government and public policy was not to fight ideological battles but to try to effectively solve really vexing public policy challenges.”
He aims to be defiantly nonpartisan.
“It’s part of Rob’s fiber,” said Steve Radke, the chairman of the Wisconsin Policy Forum and vice president of government relations at Northwestern Mutual. “Others have their value come from political influence or partisan maneuvering. Rob gains his value from being a totally nonpartisan provider of facts. And that is what some policymakers really look for at times. And Rob is there to do it at those times. He knows that is his and the forum’s niche and he doesn’t try to stray from it.”
Radke said he doesn’t know Henken’s politics.
“Lots of people to the left of center just assume that because we tend to analyze fiscal issues that I’m a Republican,” Henken said. “Fiscal conservative people on the right, because we’re not afraid to say there are times when we need to consider new revenues, think I’m a lefty. That’s the way I like it.”
Henken leads an organization that has been around for more than a century and was known for decades as the Public Policy Forum.
In 2018, the Public Policy Forum merged with the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance to form the Wisconsin Policy Forum.
With the new name, bulked up staff and offices in Milwaukee and Madison, the organization’s mission is “to provide informed analysis of critical policy issues affecting local governments, school districts, and the state of Wisconsin.”
The policy forum does annual budget briefs for Milwaukee Public Schools, the City of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County. Henken spearheaded a three-year examination of infrastructure needs in the city and county, key reports that may drive policy in the years ahead.
The forum has also beefed up its online presence with interactive tools including data from 422 school districts and hundreds of municipalities.
In an era punctuated by cries of “fake news” and ardent disagreement over facts, Henken said the Wisconsin Policy Forum’s mission “is more important than ever.”
Being named Person of the Year, he said, is “an honor for the good work of the Wisconsin Policy Forum. We have a whole organization. I’m embarrassed if people are citing me because it’s a 12person staff that I think is just doing great stuff.”