New chief lays out future of GMC
Says prosperity must reach all of Milwaukee
Joel Brennan has been a familiar face in both the private and public sectors for 30 years. Brennan started his career as a legislative aide for former Mayor Tom Barrett in the early 1990s. This year, he took on the role of president of the Greater Milwaukee Committee, after serving as Gov. Tony Evers’ top Cabinet official.
Brennan replaces Julia Taylor, who served as president of the GMC for 19 years. The Journal Sentinel recently caught up with Brennan to find out how he plans to transform the GMC. Below is an edited version of our interview.
Question: The GMC’s mission statement talks about building economic and cultural vitality in Metropolitan Milwaukee. What is the best way to build economic vitality and culture?
Brennan: Milwaukee already possesses significant economic vitality and culture, which is the result of a community that cares deeply about these things and invests in areas of opportunity and growth.
However, to become the city we aspire to be, we must ensure that prosperity in Milwaukee is real and visible in every corner of the community, and that has not been the case for the last 40 years. The disinvestment didn’t happen overnight, and the regeneration won’t happen immediately, either. But we can and must make incremental progress and assist the residents and stakeholders who are working to make their neighborhoods strong and vital once again.
In a state and country where division reigns, we will expand the area’s economic vitality by presenting a unified front in order to grow and attract talent in Milwaukee and increase opportunity for all our residents. The business community should be aligned with our local elected leaders in our efforts to move state legislators to do what is necessary to protect vital public services, including law enforcement, in our community.
Ultimately, the best way to unleash further economic vitality and enhance our cultural portfolio is to empower our strongest asset – our residents – to showcase their incredible talent, resilience, and passion. That will take an all-hands effort and engagement by the public, private and non-profit sectors in the years to come.
Q. How will the GMC be reimagined under your leadership? What problems do you want to solve?
Brennan: The GMC will celebrate its 75th anniversary in 2023, and the organization has been reimagined often during that long history. Under the leadership of Julia Taylor over the last two decades, membership expanded and became much more reflective of the Greater Milwaukee Community, and the organization heightened its focus on equity and opportunity for every community resident. We will deepen those efforts, even as we revisit tactics or specific initiatives in response to the major changes wrought on our community and our world by COVID-19 and other forces.
During the search process for Julia’s successor, GMC members and community leaders provided important insight into the issues that they believe the organization should tackle in the coming years. Education, economic opportunity, and racial equity were highlighted in those community conversations, and we will certainly con
tinue to work on those with an eye toward where we can lead and where we can be a strong collaborator with others who are already working to make necessary changes in our community.
Since starting in late January, I have heard from the community an interest in having the GMC be a partner on issues like mental and physical health, transit, housing, early childhood education, and public safety, and we will explore the best ways to involve our membership in those efforts in the years to come. Member organizations like the GMC certainly have a role to play in supporting the Milwaukee Police Department as they take on reckless driving and other criminal activity that creates unease everywhere in our community.
Over the next few months, the GMC will engage in a formal strategic planning effort with our members and the community to map out more specifically how we can best serve Milwaukee. One thing I have heard from members and community leaders is a desire that the GMC focus on a small number of priority areas and lay out strategies to have its members make an impact that is measurable and apparent to our stakeholders and to the community.
Q. Milwaukee County leaders have been proposing a 1% sales tax increase since 2019, but it hasn’t gotten any momentum in the state Legislature. This idea has been championed by the Wisconsin Policy Forum and MMAC. How should the GMC become involved?
Brennan: Over the last three years, the GMC has been involved with a group of stakeholders, including the MMAC, the City of Milwaukee, Milwaukee County, and some members of the State Legislature. The proposal has gained momentum and enjoys bipartisan support from Milwaukee area legislators. While it did not pass in the recently completed legislative session, a sales tax proposal will be reintroduced in the next session, and it is imperative that the GMC, MMAC and any of the groups that represent Milwaukee area businesses mobilize their members to be active advocates for this critically important legislation.
Without an alternative to the overreliance on the property tax levy in Milwaukee County, especially in the City of Milwaukee, basic services around trash collection, snow removal, infrastructure and even law enforcement will be at risk within the next two to three years. Forward movement on this issue is no longer a “nice to have” but a community imperative.
Q: The Milwaukee Brewers are working up a list of future American Family Field improvements that will be the responsibility of the public district which owns the ballpark. If the total cost is more than the $87 million already set aside for that work, how should the public pay for those additional expenses now that the stadium sales tax is gone?
Brennan: Like many others in the community, I eagerly await the upcoming report from the Brewers about the long-term needs of American Family Field and the potential investments required to maintain the world-class standards that have made the facility one of the best destinations in major league baseball for the players on the field and the fans in the stands.
Depending on the needs that are identified, the conversation about improvements to the ballpark should be considered alongside the obligation to provide basic city and county services in the years to come. Local resources likely exist to address each of these issues, and the community will be wrestling with all these challenges and opportunities with the Wisconsin State Legislature in the coming months. Milwaukee area taxpayers have shown over the years that they are willing to invest in order to keep major league sports in Milwaukee, and we will likely once again be addressing the notion of public money for sports venues in the years to come. We can’t shy away from that discussion, but we also simply must recognize the challenges to basic services if the Wisconsin State Legislature fails to give Milwaukee greater flexibility to define its own future.
On a broader level, Milwaukee and the State of Wisconsin will need to find ways to invest and reinvest in our cultural assets. After the last two years in which music venues, movie theaters, museums and other attractions have faced very real danger of closing their doors, I am confident that significant pent-up demand exists for these venues and their industries from residents, tourists and visitors. However, if we simply stand still, we will lose visitors, tourism revenue and economic opportunity to communities who make it a priority to invest in their community assets. How much public money goes into these investments is a conversation we must have as a community, but we simply cannot ignore quality-of-life assets if we want to generate economic activity and attract and retain talented people who can make Milwaukee stronger in the future than it is today.
Q. For years the GMC, MMAC, United Way of Greater Milwaukee and Waukesha Counties, Greater Milwaukee Foundation and others have talked about working together or done so to varying degrees. What do you see has been effective? What has been accomplished? And what can be done better?
Brennan: Each of these organizations has accomplished important objectives and continues to make progress in our community. The Greater Milwaukee Foundation has embarked on a campaign to raise $700 million with a north star of racial equity guiding its efforts. The United Way in recent years has made incredible progress on ending chronic homelessness, which comes on the heels of the dramatic reduction in teen pregnancy that United Way also led several years ago. And the MMAC continues to make significant changes in the educational landscape in Milwaukee and statewide. These are just some of their successes, and all of them are collaborative efforts that involve public, private and nonprofit partners.
Our organizations already work together, and the efforts to provide greater flexibility in generating local revenue through a local sales tax is one example. The MMAC and the GMC have been at the table together with legislators and other stakeholders for several years regarding the need for additional revenue opportunities in Milwaukee, and we will remain strong allies in the months to come. The Greater Milwaukee Foundation and Greater Milwaukee Committee have been partners in MKE United, especially through the anti-displacement fund that has helped keep hundreds of families on both the near north and near south sides from being forced to sell their home as a result of increasing property taxes.
But each of the leaders of those organizations believe that we can do even more to elevate the most critical issues in our community and collaborate with resources and strategy to get more accomplished.
Q. How do you plan to work with the city of Milwaukee going forward?
Brennan: The GMC has a long history of working with city leaders on important issues, and that collaboration has never been more important than this moment in our history. The GMC is partnering with the mayor and the Milwaukee Police Department on a study (to be completed this summer) that will outline the appropriate police force size moving forward. The results of this examination will enable us to see where Milwaukee sits alongside peer cities in our commitment of law enforcement resources and how MPD may deploy resources in the future.
The most important issue where the GMC can provide support in the coming months is the community’s effort to convince the State Legislature to allow the city and the county to expand the local sales tax and to reduce our overreliance on property taxes. The GMC and its members will work with local elected officials, the MMAC and other partners to drive an outcome that allows the city and the county to preserve and protect many of their basic services while affording some opportunity to make investments for the long term that will make our community an attractive place to live, work and play.
An additional area where the GMC will seek to provide support concerns the significant resources flowing into Milwaukee from the American Rescue Plan Act. Through actions taken by the Evers administration, federal funds will be funneled directly into many Milwaukee area organizations to assist small business development, provide technical support and offer other tools for economic recovery and growth. Because I spent much of the last two years at the state level working to direct these funds to industries, businesses and communities around the state, I feel a personal commitment to ensuring that we utilize these funds in ways that can make long-term systemic change. We will explore ways that GMC members and businesses can partner with nonprofit organizations receiving federal dollars over the next few years to bring change to parts of the community that have suffered from disinvestment for too long. With the appropriate spirit of collaboration, we can leverage these funds to make real change and bring economic vitality and opportunity to more of our residents.