Our Messy County Board Race

April 7 is this year’s Milwaukee County Board election, and it is unfortunately, quite messy. As much as I hoped to see contested races in many districts, there are only three. I sent everyone, candidates, challenged incumbents, and unchallenged incumbents the same five questions centering actual policies. I didn’t get many answers. 

Get the mess out of the way

A little messy: LeVan Roundtree seems to be a hand-picked successor for Sequanna Taylor’s seat. He’s running unopposed, and I hear his mom was once her campaign manager. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but I like primaries, and am disappointed that 5th district voters won’t have another choice. To his credit, Roundtree also seems disappointed. He made efforts to do community outreach, even made a campaign website. I can respect that. 

Other green flags for Roundtree include policy positions like “Prevention over punishment. Rehabilitation over incarceration.” and his ambition and innovation in general. He’s a “fashion psychologist” which seems cool! I hope it means he’ll bring creativity and energetic engagement to a County Board known for laxity and rubber stamping. A red flag: He works at the Howard Fuller Collegiate Academy. Fuller is one of the architects of school privatization which is starving Milwaukee Public Schools of needed resources, creating very shitty situations. 

Messy but irrelevant: 

Perennial candidate, bootlicker, and far-right troll Ryan Antczak is running against Kathleen Vincent in District 11. He’s messy enough to get a criminal complaint filed against him for putting out fliers with false information on them. This is the second time he caught that charge. Antczak was always unlikely to win, and if he did, he would be an unwelcome force for ignorance and bigotry. 

Long history of messy:

Patti Logsdon and Steve Taylor, two of the most conservative forces on the current County Board, seem to hate each other for reasons I don’t really need to know, because the only thing I want from either of them is their resignation and replacement. Taylor is supporting Dr Maqsood Kahn, a challenger to Logsdon. Logsdon’s backers are furious about it, and about the growing Muslim population in Franklin. Kahn is Muslim, but he’s also a pro-police conservative. Logsdon is even more conservative, though, once proposing that we organize a bake sale rather than push the county to address exploitation and conditions at the county jail. I hope to see her go, but don’t expect drastic improvement with Kahn.

Interesting despite the messy:

Incumbent Felesia Martin tried to block challenger Stacy Smiter from running by filing frivolous challenges to his nomination papers based on a clerical error on his birth certificate. Martin withdrew the challenge once the election commission told her it was unfounded. The messy part is that Michelle Bryant, a radio host on WNOV, talked about it on air. She said that, even though she knows there was nothing improper going on, she still disparaged Smiter “because I knew he had received a pardon… had some criminal background,” and that Smiter was using the two names “intentionally.” Smiter had to use time in his interview on Facts over Feelings to discuss and dismiss these unfounded allegations. 

Beyond the mess, actual issues

Of these few races, Stacy Smiter’s challenge to Felesia Martin in district 7 feels the most likely to impact the political balance on the board, especially around key budget issues, which is the most important part of the County Board’s work. 

Everyone recognizes that the deepest problem in Milwaukee County is a lack of funding. Wisconsin has an outdated shared revenue scheme which allows the state to collect all the taxes and revenue from counties and municipalities across the state and then redistribute it according to their whims. This system has always taken more from Milwaukee than it gives back, but in the last 20 years, under the vicious Republican gerrymander, Milwaukee has been increasingly squeezed and milked to subsidize whiter populations, and conservative priorities across the state. 

The problem was in many ways made worse by Act 12, which increased revenue by imposing a regressive sales tax, and then required that the county never reduce funding for law enforcement. Even worse, every single budget County Executive David Crowley has proposed increased spending on law enforcement. Every year, the Sheriff (whether its David Clarke, Earnell Lucas, or Donita Ball) also overspends their budget. In 2025, the County Board wasted $250,000 on a wholly inadequate audit by a private consulting firm, which just called for spending even more money on MCSO. Meanwhile, they keep killing people in the jail. 

The profligate spending of the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) is wasting our meager revenue from the crooked state government, and strangling every other thing this county needs for health, wellness, transportation, economic stability, and true public safety. 

On this most important issue, the contrast between Smiter and Martin is clear, as you can see in their interviews on WUWM. Smiter said: "Look at where we are spending the money. I get that some of our bills are mandated, but those mandates don’t have a dollar amount. So cutting money where it doesn’t need to be spent.” On his website, and in his answers to our questions, he's more explicit: "I will demand accountability for every dollar spent in the justice system: performance-based funding, oversight hearings, and public outcome reporting." 

Meanwhile Martin said: “They finally give us this tool where we can raise sales taxes, great, cool… No boo… there is stipulation on those dollars and what we can use them for... towards the pension plan, towards the sheriff’s department, hmmm but we need mental health services? Too bad, so sad, you’re not going to do with those dollars." Martin’s interview with Facts Over Feelings has even more of this combative evasiveness. She spends more than half of the interview arguing with one of the co-hosts and contradicting herself about when and how it's okay to run for office. She did mention her respectable record of service, especially visiting and advocating for youth held at Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake. I also like how she described developers having a “locust mentality” because they just want to take everything. Her website has no policy page, but includes a photo of her with a herd of cops, and what looks like a hastily copy-pasted list of resolutions she’s co-sponsored, including one to give MCSO $252,380 for a body scanner.

Will Stacy Smiter take on the MCSO like Ryan Clancy used to when he was on the county board? Unlikely. Smiter is not an abolitionist. He’s calling for stiffer penalties on repeat offenders, a costly and ineffective policy that will increase prison crowding, recirculating hardship and instability in our communities, ultimately doing more harm than good for public safety. Compared with Martin, however, Smiter looks like a welcome opportunity for change.