There is finally some hope for the return of a sensible center in Dane County politics.
This week ten county supervisors voted against a budget amendment that would take money from the Sheriff’s budget and allocate it to human services spending, including $233,000 to an organization called Urban Triage.
Sup. Michael Engelberger questioned, appropriately, Urban Triage’s stewardship of taxpayer dollars. The organization’s CEO Brandi Grayson is paid $260,000 — more than the entire amount coming back to her organization under the budget amendment. (The $260,000 salary was reported in the State Journal, but a Google search reports it at $290,000.) To put this in context, the Governor, Dane County Executive and Mayor of Madison all earn between $165,000 and $170,000. The United Way of Dane County’s CEO makes about as much as Grayson, but her salary represents about 1.5% of the organization’s budget while Grayson’s accounts for about 7% of Urban Triage’s budget.
And it gets curiouser. Because, according to IRS filings, her salary was a more reasonable $124,000 in 2022. What justifies that massive increase? If Urban Triage were funded entirely by private contributions that would only be a question for its donors. But when a nonprofit is overwhelmingly funded by public dollars from Dane County and the city of Madison, that requires an answer.
Moreover, there’s reason to question Grayson’s performance and judgement. She was arrested by Madison police in an incident last year that, had she been anyone else, would have prompted cries of outrage and calls for her resignation. Grayson parked her car in the loading zone of a downtown theatre, was verbally abusive to a security guard, refused to move her vehicle and then disobeyed the orders of Madison cops and had to be physically removed from the vehicle. And all of that followed an earlier incident where she broke down the door at the home of a former boyfriend and berated him resulting in another police call.
Last spring Grayson pleaded guilty to three misdemeanors involving those two incidents.
And Grayson has repeatedly made public remarks unbecoming of a community leader. For example, when she lost a race for Madison alder in 2021, she claimed that it was due to “anti-Blackness,” never mind that the district includes Madison’s traditional black neighborhood and that her opponent was also a black woman. After the police shooting of Corey Ruiz this summer she irresponsibly rushed to judgement and called it a “murder.” You have to wonder where her board of directors is. Are they paying any attention at all?
Further, Engelberger made the point that the county’s human resources budget is $335 million and so they should be able to reallocate funds within that budget to come up with this relatively small amount instead of raiding the Sheriff’s budget, which is half the size.
If anything, Engelberger didn’t go far enough. He and his fellow supervisors should be questioning why any taxpayer money is going to Urban Triage. Still, you start where you can. So let’s credit Supervisors Engelberger, Jerry Bollig, David Boetcher, Patrick Downing, Jeffrey Kroning, Kerry Marren, Gussie Lewis, Paula Brandmeier, David Peterson and Don Postler for voting against this amendment.
They came up short as the 27 other board members voted for the amendment. But this isn’t a bad showing for moderate views in a county that has grown increasingly hard-left.
And that small ray of hope joins a successful effort last month by the Madison City Council to fire the bumbling interim Police Monitor. That vote took place after an endless and brutal public hearing in which several speakers who opposed the firing matched Grayson for incivility and outrageous statements. The Council nonetheless did not wilt under the onslaught. It did the right thing and fired the monitor.
I have long thought there needed to be some sort of moderate organization to support centrist candidates for local offices. That has not happened, but maybe it’ll happen in reverse. Instead of an organization electing moderate candidates, maybe current office holders, forced by circumstances, will seek to create their own political infrastructure as a way of gaining more sensible colleagues like themselves.
We can only hope.
