Time to Triage Urban Triage

Why do local governments do business with Urban Triage?

That question comes to mind now because the Madison nonprofit overspent a Dane County contract to provide homeless services. They overspent a $317,000 contract by $100,000. I ran two nonprofits. I have no idea how this is even possible. The organization’s executive director blames new accounting software, which teeters on the edge of credibility. Auditors had pointed to inadequate tracking of expenditures years before this incident.

Urban Triage’s founder and executive director is Brandi Grayson, a flame thrower of an activist who raised her profile after the 2020 police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

In April, 2021, I wrote a blog about Grayson after she lost a race for Madison alder on the city’s Southside. She was less than gracious in defeat. According to a report in Isthmus, after the results came in, Grayson said her Southside district “voted for anti BLACKNESS. It wasn’t just [white] people, it was Black people. Lots of Black people. Elders. Church folks. Conservatives. Moderates. And others who just didn’t vote,” Grayson wrote on Facebook on election night. “It was CONFIRMATION that Madison will kill me and allow the mayor and the same alders to show up to give condolences.” 

Well, credit her for honest analysis, anyway. When you point out that you ran as a Black candidate and yet you lost the votes of lots of Black people, including people from a wide swath of the ideological spectrum as well as the most respected leaders in the community, that takes some courage. It might also prompt some soul-searching on the part of the candidate. 

But not from Grayson. To her way of thinking, getting beat two-to-one in the district with the highest Black population in the city is confirmation of anti-Blackness. And never mind that she was running against another Black woman, then incumbent Ald. Sheri Carter, who has since retired. 

In fact, Grayson’s campaign was curious from the start. She decided to take on Carter, who was widely respected for how well she represented her district and for being a voice of reason on the council. She’s also the first Black woman to ever serve as council president, so she’s actually an historic figure.

Grayson, of course, did not take any personal responsibility for her own defeat, though she said some things during her campaign that raised eyebrows. Again, to quote the story in Isthmus: “Grayson also strayed far from local issues, drawing criticism from Indigenous people for calling them “red” and claiming that Black people were “the original inhabitants of the land known as America.””

Let’s just pause for a moment and reflect on this comment. If anyone else had made a comment like that would Dane County have done business with their organization?

Also in that 2021 blog, I noted that in 2020 Urban Triage received over $700,000 in the city and school district budgets, some of that pass through federal dollars from the COVID relief bills. I urged local government leaders to take a hard look at the organization before awarding them any new contracts. But they didn’t. In fact, Dane County has passed through about $33 million in federal money to Urban Triage over the last three years. And now there’s this mess.

Grayson hasn’t mellowed with the years. When the Wisconsin State Journal tried to get her explanation of the $100,000 overspend, she refused to talk with them, sending an email telling the paper that she wouldn’t respond, “until you are ready to tell our story in a fair and unbiased manner.”

Grayson is a political activist and, as such, she can say what she wants. But it’s quite another thing to administer tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer money. Those taxpayers deserve some answers to hard questions about how Grayson and Urban Triage were vetted to get these contracts in the first place. She doesn’t have to talk to reporters. She does have to answer to the county and, since Urban Triage will have to cover the $100,000 overage, to her own board of directors.