October Update: County Newsletter
Happy October to everyone! It’s been a busy month for the County Board on a lot of fronts. As tension in the sphere of national politics becomes more acute, I turn to our work locally for hope. While there are many reasons to feel frustration and fear, there have been many opportunities for hope as well.
Our actual county board meetings have been pretty brief, but I have links to the recordings below in case you’re interested anyway. Most of the action has been happening in budget hearings and committee meetings, so I’ll focus on those.
October is the month where the Finance and Administration Committee hears the proposed budget from the various departments under the County Executive. You can find the Executive’s overview of the economic state of the county here during our October 1st board meeting. Next week, the week of October 21st, there are hearings every night to work out the details of the proposed budget to be presented from each of the departments’ planning meetings. I’ll spare you the very fun details of this, but we will vote to approve the budget on November 4th, and then the board adjourns sine die, and we begin the next session in the next scheduled County Board meeting date. If there are any surprises or notable controversies in the passing of the budget, I will update you in my November newsletter.
One thing I would like to highlight from October is a meeting of the Legislative Committee that ended up being of no consequence but was emblematic of the power of community engagement in government. Supervisor Keith Gray wrote a “Resolution to Discourage the Resettlement of Migrants in Kenosha County.” The resolution left a lot to be desired in terms of substantive legislative power, but the community saw it for what it was, a sign of hateful rhetoric trying to edge its way into our community spaces and local government. The community came out in droves to flood our committee meeting, and tell us that this kind of nonsense has no place here. People brought personal stories, family history, world history, scripture, and the passion of the inclusive place we all know Kenosha can be. Supervisor Gray was forced to walk back the resolution in light of the response, admitting that democracy had spoken, and the will of the people had been violated. The vote was all but finalized at that point, but it remained a unanimous “nay” across the board. In a moment of great national and global uncertainty in the faith of our system, I took this night to be a small reminder that most of us are looking out for our neighbors, and I let that give me a little bit of hope. Thank you to everyone who showed up and showed us how our systems can actually work.
On that note, enjoy the rest of your autumn and don’t forget to vote! If you don’t vote, you can’t complain, and who would want that privilege taken away from them? ;)
Recordings:
October 1st County Board (Executive Kerkman’s Budget presentation): https://www.youtube.com/live/pn-EKLJ0UK0?si=SwvTfpbNf8LQMYhO
October 15th Legislative Committee Meeting (discussion of resolution discouraging migrant resettlement): https://www.youtube.com/live/geVRkUovZlg?si=A5umZSRxNUz5JnpN
Community comments begin right away, at 00:00:25
Supervisor discussion of the resolution begin at 01:11:30
October 15th County Board Meeting:https://www.youtube.com/live/l_BaqdqilV4?si=Dohceax2ZKjsaq_W