UPDATE: Members of the Milwaukee Common Council have issued a joint statement on the resignations:
“Today’s news that Fire and Police Commission (FPC) Chairman Ed Fallone and Vice Chairwoman Amanda Avalos will be resigning effective 12:01 a.m. Friday cannot be interpreted as anything other than a monumental loss for the City of Milwaukee.
Since joining the body, Chairman Fallone and Vice Chairwoman Avalos have helped oversee a period of stability for the FPC. We want to thank them for their service to our community and wish them the best moving forward.
As has been stated time and time again, Wisconsin Act 12 included a number of outrageous provisions aimed specifically at the City of Milwaukee. Among them was removing the FPC’s authority to set policies for the police and fire departments, and transferring that responsibility to each department’s chief. This overreaching provision greatly diluted an important oversight responsibility held by the FPC, and is already causing talented, thoughtful individuals to leave their posts, in the end hurting the citizens of Milwaukee the most.
We on the Common Council have opposed these State-mandated provisions at every turn, and will continue to do what we can to right these wrongs.”
The statement was issued by Alders JoCasta Zamarripa, Mark Chambers, Jonathan Brostoff, Robert Bauman, Lamont Westmoreland, Mark Borkowski, José Pérez, Scott Spiker, and Marina Dimitrijevic
MILWAUKEE – Both Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission Chair Ed Fallone and Vice Chair Amanda Avalos have resigned from their board positions in protest of a condition of the city of Milwaukee’s approval of the 2023 shared revenue plan that would remove power from the FPC.
The resignations are set to take effect at 12:01am Friday morning.
In a written statement, Fallone and Avalos stated the decision was not an easy one, but necessary to ensure nobody would consider them in favor of a provision that gives more authority to the Chief of Milwaukee Police and takes it away from the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission.
“We feel that, by continuing to serve on the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission, our continued service might be construed as an indication that we accept the substantial restrictions on FPC authority contained in the recently enacted Act 12” the statement read. “We do not accept these changes to the authority of the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission.”
The FPC provision is one of many that local leaders have taken issue with in the proposal that allowed the city to create a two percent sales tax. Some, like District Four Alderman Bob Bauman, have indicated that the provisions could provide cause for litigation against state legislators.
