Half a million dollars in Dane County funds earmarked for criminal justice reform will go toward hiring four new county employees, delivering $200,000 in grants to nonprofits focused on violence prevention and boosting culturally competent services in the Community Restorative Court.
The spending for the restorative court and Public Health Madison and Dane County comes almost a year after the justice reform funds were first announced by County Executive Joe Parisi.
A special County Board subcommittee held meetings with people who work in the justice system and related social services to explore how to spend the funds.
“I thought it was a really big task to figure out how to spend half a million dollars to try to influence the racial disparities seen in the jail,” said Sup. Richelle Andrae, who chairs the board’s Public Protection and Judiciary committee and represents the 11th District on Madison’s West Side.
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The two hires will be coordinators in the county’s Community Restorative Courts. The court is a pretrial program that seeks to reconcile victims and those who commit crimes.
Also, a part-time data analyst will be added to the restorative court, in addition to about $71,000 for culturally sensitive behavioral health and peer support services. The remaining funding will go to a a new violence prevention program supervisor with the city and county’s public health agency and a violence prevention grant program for nonprofits.
“I think the biggest thing we heard from folks is the need for culturally competent peer support,” said Analiese Eicher, whose 3rd District is in Sun Prairie. “This allows them to have not only additional people working directly with them but other folks in the community who are trained, who have that experience to work with folks impacted.”
The funding originated in the 2023 budget put out by Parisi last October along with the creation of a new county Department of Justice Reform.
Recent turmoil
But getting that department off the ground and staffed has faced difficulties. Parisi’s administration pulled the plug on a hiring process for the department’s director in May despite already identifying five finalists. The county executive cited fallout from the board’s rejection of state Rep. Shelia Stubbs’ nomination to lead the county’s Department of Human Services. Supervisors complained that Stubbs was chosen without a national hiring search.
As a national recruitment effort restarted, Parisi nominated former Dane County Sheriff Dave Mahoney to serve as the office’s interim director. But supervisors stopped Mahoney’s nomination at a committee meeting in June. They again stopped consideration of the former sheriff’s nomination earlier this month. Supervisors voted 19-14 against an attempt to bring Mahoney’s nomination up for discussion by the board.
Sup. Rick Rose, who represents parts of Madison’s Far East Side in the 16th District, said community members involved in the creation and direction of the Department of Justice Reform did not want a member of law enforcement leading it.
“They don’t want law enforcement to be at the head of that table,” Rose said. “They can be at the table, but they don’t want law enforcement, the courts or the District Attorney’s Office to be at the head of that table.”
The funding passed by the board on Thursday differs from what was first proposed by a subcommittee that studied how to use the money.
Originally, that subcommittee, chaired by Anthony Gray, a supervisor for Madison’s 14th District, wanted to make the restorative court’s data analyst a full-time position. Beyond that, the initial proposal included covering three years of pay for a community safety worker with Focused Interruption, a Madison nonprofit committed to reducing gun violence and assisting those affected by it.
But Eicher said that the funding violence prevention in the original plans “wasn’t as broad as it could be.”
“As opposed to giving it to one organization, this grant program allows us to be in a number of communities with a number of organizations,” Eicher said.
Focused Interruption could still apply for some of the grant funding and already receives funding for violence prevention from Public Health Madison and Dane County.
The original plans diverted remaining money, about $7,100, to the Department of Justice Reform. That funding was removed because the department does not yet have proper leadership, Eicher said.
New members
At the onset of Thursday night’s meeting, three new supervisors were sworn in to fill vacancies.
The county’s newest supervisors are:
Jay Brower
- , a labor organizer with SEIU Wisconsin;
- , the president of the Verona City Council; and,
Steven Peters
- , a former board supervisor and an administrator for worker’s compensation with the state Department of Workforce Development.
Brower will represent student-heavy areas on the Near West Side. Kemp now represents parts of Verona and the town of Verona and Peters represents the West Side of Madison.
Those districts were left without representation on the board with the resignations of Sups. Mike Bare, Alex Joers and Olivia Xistris-Songpanya. Bare and Joers were elected to the state Assembly last year.
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