Kenosha mayor: Race is No. 1 priority
After Jacob Blake’s death, a reckoning
KENOSHA, Wis. – When John Antaramian thinks about the 20 years he has served in two stints as mayor of Kenosha, one mistake sticks out in his mind.
In 2000, Antaramian formed a committee to address what he described as several “racial issues” facing the city, particularly around the quality of housing and homeownership.
“We spent about a year working on different issues. ... We actually came to some solutions on those issues,” Antaramian said. “My mistake was I didn’t keep that committee together.
“I’m refusing to make that mistake a second time. I’m getting too old to make too many mistakes.”
He said, “We thought we solved the problem, and we didn’t.”
After Jacob Blake, 29, a Black man, was shot in the back by a white Kenosha police officer on Aug. 23, the city was thrust into the center of the nation’s reckoning on race.
The violence and unrest that followed, including the case of an Illinois teen charged with killing two protesters and injuring a third, laid bare issues Antaramian said he thought had been improved through the earlier effort.
The national spotlight has shifted away from Kenosha to tragedies in Portland, Oregon, Rochester, New York, and elsewhere. But officials, activists and concerned citizens are engaging in a conversation on how to move the city forward.
Addressing racial issues, Antaramian said, “is the number one priority that we have to deal with in our community.”
There is no fast solution, he noted. “There’s nothing that we’re going to do that would automatically, ‘Oh, this is taken care of. All these people are not going to be mad anymore. Everything is going to be just hunky-dory,’” he said in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “This is going to be a long process.”
Listening to the people
To try to begin the healing process, Antaramian launched a series of four listening sessions to allow community members to tell him and other city officials, including law enforcement, how they feel.
The first session on Sept. 20 was sparsely attended but spirited.
For about an hour, attendees expressed their frustration about how the police responded to protesters and offered ideas to improve the situation. Afterward, Antaramian met one-on-one with several activists.
“It’s unfortunate the mayor isn’t a great public speaker,” said Diamond Hartwell, a Kenosha activist. “But if you sit down and calm him down and have a conversation with him, it can be a constructive conversation.”
Activist Porche Bennett said her conversation with the mayor went “shockingly” well.
“He has some good ideas, but it’s like I told him, it’s an action thing,” Bennett said. “You got to put action behind this.”
“It sounds like he is trying to do a little bit more,” activist Brian Little said. “He’s making an effort, finally. That’s all we can do is ask for that at this point in time right now.”
Antaramian enlisted clergy, led by Turning Point Life Church Pastor Roy Peeples, to act as bridges to the community.
“Yes, he does have his own way of understanding the issues and problems,” Peeples said. “He does have love for the community.”
Bennett is willing to give Antaramian a chance.
“For some reason, I don’t know why, I believe him,” she said. “He looks me in my eyes when he talks to me. A lot of people don’t do that, and that makes me not be able to trust them when they talk to me. But he looks me in my eyes when he talks to me. So I can give him the benefit of the doubt, for now, because, again, I want to see action.”
20 years as mayor
After he was elected in 1992, Antaramian focused on investing in homeownership in poorer neighborhoods.
Antaramian helped establish a program in which the city bought a vacant house and a carpenter hired high school students to help rehab it. The money generated by the sale went back into the program, so it could expand to another house.
“The goal has always been 50% homeownership in the older neighborhoods,” Antaramian said. “When you have 50% homeownership, everyone wins. The individuals who are renters start participating in the neighborhood because it’s their neighborhood and people care.”
The Youth Employment in the Arts program helped fund public murals designed and created by young people, none of which was damaged during the unrest, he said, “because the kids did it, it was their work.”
Antaramian decided not to run in 2008, saying he felt Kenosha was in a good place. Then the Great Recession hit the city hard, and funding for many programs he helped create evaporated. Antaramian ran and won in 2016; he was reelected in April.
“It took me a lot of years to create the programs that we had before they went away,” he said. “It’s not going to happen
tomorrow that these programs are coming back. We have to get funding sources back in place to make it happen.”
Antaramian, a Democrat, is a politician who can reach out to get help from Republicans. During this time of divided government in Madison, those skills will be put to the test.
“I know he cares passionately about the community he represents, and he brings a collaborative approach to benefit the city and region,” Tommy Thompson, a former Republican governor and current University of Wisconsin System president, said in a statement to the Journal Sentinel.
“He is always looking out for Kenosha,” Thompson said. “There is a wealth of opportunity in this region that has had much economic success that John has been key to building.”
The city of Kenosha is strongly Democratic, but the county is much more split – it was the closest in the state in 2016, going narrowly to Donald Trump by less than 300 votes.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Kenosha County’s population is almost 170,000 – about 75.4% white, nearly 8% Black and 13.5% Hispanic. More than half of the population, nearly 100,000, live in the city. Of that, 66% are white, 11.5% are Black and 17.6% are Hispanic.
While the listening sessions continue, Antaramian is hesitant to say what needs to change, but he has made clear he does not support cutting funding for police – a central aim of protesters.
Though there are many definitions for “defunding the police,” it generally means shifting funding from police departments to other services, such as social workers.
“We don’t have a huge amount of police, so I don’t see reducing the police budget as the solution,” Antaramian said. “What the solution is, I think, is how we spend our money smartly and what we spend it on.”
Antaramian said he wants to examine how the police can be better used.
“A lot of our (policing) is based off of complaints or problems, shootings, stuff like that. … We need to talk with the neighborhoods a little bit more as to how we’re doing things and what we’re doing,” he said. “And it needs to be a better relationship on the basis with the police and the neighborhood.”
He’d like to repair the relationship with young Black men.
“We lose them in the sense that they don’t feel that there’s any hope,” Antaramian said. “There’s so many young people with huge amounts of potential, they need to become the next leaders. They need to become the individuals that are going to be the next policemen, the next firemen, the next mayor, whatever it is that they want to do.”
“This is going to be a long process.” Mayor John Antaramian
The wait for progress
Antaramian acknowledged it could take years for changes to take hold.
He pointed to work at the old Chrysler engine plant, which used to be a mainstay employer for the city, as an example of how long change can take. He said the city spent about $30 million in the past four years to clean up the longvacant site so it can be redeveloped.
The aim is to build innovation centers and education facilities to help young people.
“It will be a neighborhood focus,” Antaramian said. “That’s the process that’s already started, and that’s been going on for four years I’ve been cleaning up that site.”
He talked of improving mental health services.
“We need to get a mental health facility in this town; there isn’t one in the sense of a hospital or where someone can go,” Antaramian said. “Those are the types of things we can do.”
In the short term, the Police Department will get funding to buy body cameras in next year’s budget, a year ahead of schedule.
When the listening sessions are completed, Antaramian said, he’ll review what was talked about, and “there may be things we can do quickly” without waiting for assistance from the state or county.
Antaramian warned that substance is required, not simply calls for action.
“Resolutions don’t do anything,” he said. “You can (pass) all the resolutions you want ... if we’re going to do something, then we’re going to listen to people, we’re going to put together an actual plan of what we’re going to do. I’ll take that to council.”
Peeples, the Turning Point pastor, said the “window is open” to create change.
“We can’t go back and change the past, no man can do that, but we can work with the future in this moment, right now,” he said. “Our community was in trauma for eight years (after the Great Recession) where there was all kinds of issues and all kinds of problems that crept in.”