After Republican convention, Milwaukee wonders if it was worth it • Wisconsin Examiner

The Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee drew 50,000 attendees to the city, but a number of factors led to lower-than-expected business activity in the city center. Many locals in the predominantly Democratic city stayed away. Security fencing around the convention center made it difficult for delegates to access bars and restaurants just outside the secure area. And during the convention, some of the more than 4,000 extra police officers who came from states across the country shot and killed a man more than a mile from the convention’s secure area.

Agreeing to hold the convention was a controversial decision among Milwaukee residents, who debated whether the potential economic impact was worth inviting thousands of representatives from a party that has demonized the city for years. On Friday, as those attendees poured out of town and the city’s regular summer schedule of street festivals, bike rides and beer gardens resumed, the debate continued, with locals still wondering whether the disruption was worth it.

In the weekend leading up to the convention’s opening on Monday, signs of change were clearly visible. The security footprint created around the Fiserv Forum — where the RNC was being held — left long lines of gridlocked traffic downtown. Helicopters piloted by military and law enforcement agencies circled overhead day and night. Coast Guard boats equipped with M240 Bravo belt-fed machine guns patrolled the Milwaukee River, and police saturated nearby streets.

Tuesday morning, the outlook for the rest of the week wasn’t bad. Mayor Cavalier Johnson, speaking to the Wisconsin Examiner in his City Hall office, said local festivals had benefited from RNC-sponsored events and Milwaukee was getting a lot of positive attention.

“There have been minimal issues reported, that’s what I’ve found in my briefings with the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD),” Johnson said. “People are concerned — the people who are here — and I’ve had a chance to talk to a number of them, from all over the country and actually from all over the world, if you count the foreign press. They’re all impressed with Milwaukee. A lot of them have said they’re looking forward to coming back and spending time in the city. And that’s good.”

For four days, images of Milwaukee appeared all over the world.

But downtown business and restaurant traffic had slowed, preventing the promised huge economic boost. Johnson suspected that was due to delays in the arrival of former President Donald Trump, who narrowly avoided an assassination attempt by a gunman with an AR-15-style rifle at one of his rallies in Pennsylvania just days before the convention began. The assassination attempt cast a pall over the city as the RNC began. And yet, early in the second day of the RNC, Johnson said most convention attendees seemed to be having a good time.

“These are Republicans who come from all over the country and experience Milwaukee,” Johnson said. “They’re all having a great time. I don’t know how many Republicans I’ve talked to who say this is a great city, this is a remarkable city. They’re really here on the ground and experiencing Milwaukee for what it is. So I hope that their experience will translate to Republicans who are in the state as well.”

Johnson stressed that “a strong, thriving and growing Milwaukee is ultimately good for the entire state of Wisconsin.”

But Gary Witt, the president and CEO of the Milwaukee-based Pabst Theater Group — which had complained ahead of the convention about the lack of reservations from RNC attendees at local businesses — told the Examiner that the convention’s impact was “muted” and that it was similar to 2020, when the Democratic National Convention, scheduled to be held in Milwaukee, was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I think the disappointment is that we’ve gotten caught up in a giant sales pitch,” Witt said. “We’re a city that desperately needs big events to happen here. That shouldn’t stop us in any way from trying to make those big events happen here, but we shouldn’t just blindly walk into those events without understanding the potential.”

The city, Witt added, “accepted with open arms the reality that this was going to be a $200 million investment” when “it turned out the pie wasn’t even really being served as a net result. The experience for most of downtown, the similarity to the DNC, would be that the RNC was eerily similar to the pandemic, restaurants and bars with no activity. The DNC and the RNC had one thing in common, the one thing they had in common was that they both created scenarios that were almost pandemic-like.”

Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley also expressed hope that the RNC would help raise the county’s profile. “This is a great opportunity for us to showcase our community and all the great things we have to offer people, no matter what their background or where they’re from,” Crowley told the Wisconsin Examiner in an interview Tuesday morning. “We have a great outdoor space, a great beach, and a great dining experience as well.”

But Witt said he thinks the effect of the four-day promotion on the city was less powerful. Because downtown Milwaukee didn’t have enough hotel rooms for all the convention attendees, many stayed in hotels as far away as Madison and couldn’t hang around for food and drinks in the city after the convention ended. In addition, the security situation following the attempted assassination kept downtown “locked down tighter than a Tupperware lid,” encouraging attendees to stay behind the black metal gates of the hard security perimeter.

“I think it was incredibly muted and not at all what anyone had hoped for,” Witt said. “I don’t think it’s the fault of the mayor or the city of Milwaukee, it’s the fault of the RNC and the way the city was treated at the convention, just like we were treated with the DNC.”

Because Milwaukee is a historically Democratic city, some residents questioned why the city was chosen to host the RNC. Not long before the convention began, Republican candidate Donald Trump told House Republicans that Milwaukee was “a terrible city.”

At the state level, Milwaukee has long suffered from a tense relationship with the Republican-controlled Legislature. That dynamic defined negotiations over a local sales tax and shared state revenue funding. Toward the end of those negotiations last year, Milwaukee was allowed to avert fiscal disaster in exchange for rolling back certain police reform policies adopted after 2020. The city’s Fire and Police Commission, one of the oldest citizen-led oversight boards in the country, was forced to give up its power to set police policy as part of the funding deal with the state Legislature.

Johnson cited issues like the sales tax deal, revenue sharing increases and ensuring Milwaukee’s professional baseball team stayed in town, and said working on a bipartisan basis with Republicans has accomplished a lot. “That was a win for us,” Johnson said.

“That was all because we were able to work with Republicans and Madison to make that happen.” Johnson said he hopes that in the future more people will see that “you can actually work with the leadership here in Milwaukee to get things done.”

Crowley said he thought the Republican Party “appreciated that we did this (the RNC), but I don’t think that’s necessarily the only thing that’s going to improve that relationship.” As a former state legislator, Crowley has firsthand experience trying to work across the divide. The county executive hopes that future work can be done to change “the narrative of how people see Milwaukee.”

Witt said city leaders who struck the revenue-sharing deal and agreed to hold the RNC showed the city has “new, fresh leadership” capable of negotiating with Republicans. But the result was a compromise, the upside of which, he said, only pulled Milwaukee out of a hole left by Republican lawmakers who denigrated Milwaukee and defunded it for 20 years.

“The state has held us hostage for over 20 years with shared revenue, they’re choking us to death,” Witt said. “We’re the engine. If Wisconsin is a motorboat, Milwaukee is the engine, and you better put gas in the engine.”

On Tuesday afternoon, out-of-state police officers arrived in Columbus, Ohio Milwaukee homeless man shot dead. The officers were in King Park, an area known for its high population of city homeless residents, when they saw two men fighting while at least one of them held a knife. Within 14 seconds, the officers had run over and opened fire, killing the man, identified as Samuel Sharpe Jr.

That evening, mourners gathered for a vigil and Milwaukee Police Chief Jeffrey Norman told the media that five officers had fired shots in an attempt to save someone’s life. The shooting is being investigated by the Greenfield Police Department, part of the Milwaukee Area Investigative Team that normally investigates officer-involved deaths. This was the eighth time this year that Columbus, Ohio, officers have been involved in a shooting. As Norman prepared to provide the update on Sharpe, who was not identified during the press conference, news broke that he is a finalist for a job as police chief in Austin, Texas.

Sharpe’s killing unleashed an outpouring of anger, fear, grief and questions in the community. Many wondered why the out-of-state officers were standing more than a mile outside the RNC security perimeter, despite MPD’s assurances that such officers would not be patrolling nearby communities during the RNC. The next day, Norman announced that Milwaukee officers reportedly joined their out-of-state counterparts when entering nearby communities. The shooting, however, also has sparked a broader conversation about the needs of the hundreds of people experiencing homelessness and living on the streets across MilwaukeeOn Wednesday night, much further away from the convention grounds, Milwaukee police officers exchanged gunfire with a man outside a gas station, leaving the man with non-life-threatening injuries.

During a news conference Thursday morning, Johnson said the city’s performance and preparations for the RNC had gone “pretty smoothly,” adding, “I want more major conventions, more major sporting events, more entertainment events and other major gatherings, and I want them to happen here in this city.”

Johnson reiterated what he told the Wisconsin Examiner Tuesday morning, that attendees at the convention had “very, very positive impressions of Milwaukee.” The mayor is excited for Milwaukee to become what people think of when they think of Wisconsin, or even the entire Midwest. Johnson said that while he organized the convention, he does not support Trump’s policies, and that within the Fiserv Forum during the convention, “there was a false narrative of doom, a false narrative of blame, a message from Republicans that is simply not true.”

During Thursday’s press conference, Johnson said that “the RNC is not the end, it’s the beginning.” The mayor hopes that after this “four days of publicity” there will be a “reinvigoration of interest” in Milwaukee.