Milwaukee County budget passed with gap

The Milwaukee County Board passing the county budget today with a multi-million dollar hole. And now we learned two, was identified two weeks ago, but as Bill Miston explains, county supervisors only learned about this yesterday. Yeah, hey there guys, and not all supervisors knew about it until today when they were coming here to the courthouse to pass and adopt that budget. And now they're calling for answers. We literally have not gone one day into 2027. And we already have to solve a problem. Totaling more than $4.5 million. This budget error is a major problem. But the loss of trust here is much worse. Seventeen county supervisors voted in favor of passing the budget with the whole. One didn't. We were told that it was sound. Then on the day we adopted this budget, we learned that the numbers were wrong. The county's budget director says automated calculations caused the gap and was discovered on October 20th. So the county executive office didn't know that day. Correct. The conversation was had over the last couple of weeks as we worked to find solutions. On October 30th, the director went before the finance committee to make technical corrections, but no mention of the error. The decision was mine to work with the county chair of finance, and that's where the decision was made. The county chair of finance said he didn't learn about this until yesterday. That's correct. The day after, county executive David Crowley won the election to be Wisconsin's next governor. The timing, you had to wait less than 24 hours after an election to give the solutions. They found this out two weeks ago. Finance Chair Steve Taylor says that provided plenty of time to find a solution. In a memo, possible offsets are prescription drug rebates, remaining cash on hand for finished projects, and savings through the department budgets. Those are really not solutions. Those are hypotheticals. In a statement, a spokesperson for the county executive said there's no cover-up. The budget process uncovered an error that affected less than 0.3 percent of the 2027 recommended budget, investigated the cause, corrected it, and identified and presented solutions ahead of the vote to adopt. And now county supervisors are calling for answers. They unanimously passed an amendment today calling for a full accounting of what happened, who knew what happened, and when. Reporting live in Milwaukee, Bill Miston, Fox 6 News. On that point, I'm sort of going to ask a form of what you just said. Are they saying this was the absolute earliest they could have revealed this? According to the county executive's office, they were trying to find solutions, but when you talk to supervisors, they say that they would have much rather have learned this two weeks ago during the actual budget process because they're the ones that are controlling how this will be crafted and put together, and that Taylor said they had plenty of time to find solutions, so there's definitely some anger here between the county board and the administration. All right, Bill Miston reporting live there. We'll look for follow-ups. Thank you.