County Picks Site For New Courthouse

Milwaukee County Safety Building. Photo by Graham Kilmer.

Milwaukee County will tear down the aging Safety Building, 821 W. State St., and build its long-planned new criminal courthouse in its place.

“We’ve done a lot of due diligence, looking at alternative sites, and we have come back to [the Safety Building] to say that is the right site for the long term,” Aaron Hertzberg, director of the Department of Administration told the county board’s Committee on Community, Environment and Economic Development Monday.

The county is a few years into preliminary planning efforts for a new criminal courthouse, which would replace the court operations that occur within the current Safety Building. It’s expected the project will require as much as $500 million and take at least eight years to develop.

County officials have known for over a decade that a new criminal courthouse was needed. The Safety Building, which dates to 1929, doesn’t meet modern design standards for a courthouse. That includes dedicated passageways for moving defendants in custody, or witnesses or family members. Today, everyone coming to any particular court hearing is using the same hallways to get there. It leads to violence, security issues for the facility and inmate transports, even mistrials.

But where to put the new courthouse? The decision is largely driven by the building’s purpose, Hertzberg told supervisors. It needs to be as close as possible to the county jail and the historic Milwaukee County Courthouse, 901 N. 9th St.

“This is a multi generational building that we’re building that will be here for very long time,” Hertzberg said. “It’s critically important that it be adjacent, close proximity to the [jail], so that we can minimize the distance for inmate transfer.”

Using a county owned site will save on acquisition costs, and Hertzberg said even other county owned sites, like the current Milwaukee Public Museum building, which is nearby, remain too far away for the needs of the circuit court system. “When you think about occupant transports back and forth, you need to really be right next door to make that happen really efficiently.”

MPM Site Will Be Available For Development

The decision to tear down and rebuild on the existing Safety Building site means that, in time, the county will have a vacant museum to sell or redevelop.

The nonprofit Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM) is in the process of developing a five-story, 200,000-square-foot museum at the corner of N. 6th Street and W. McKinley Avenue. Construction is scheduled to be completed in 2027. The museum collections and exhibits are already being moved. The county will eventually be left with a sprawling, vacant seven-story museum complex.

The museum was built in 1962, with additions in the 1990s for Discovery World, which later left, and the IMAX theater. The complex is nearly half a million square feet (451,161) and it has four full floors of exhibit space.

In 2024, the county hired a consultant to create a plan for the county to dispose of the building in one way or another, but with a complete picture of the value of the land and infrastructure.

In 2023, the city’s Department of City Development and the Milwaukee Downtown BID completed a 2040 Downtown Plan that included high-density, mixed-use redevelopment of the museum site. It also envisioned an extension of N. 8th Street another block north of W. Wells Street, reconnecting MacArthur Square Park to the transportation grid.

New Courthouse Cost

How will the county, which is currently faced with enormous budget deficits, pay for a new courthouse estimated at approximately $500 million? Officials hope for help from other levels of government.

Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley and his top lobbyist Alec Knutson have been pressing the issue during the ongoing state biennial budget process. Court officials like Chief Judge Carl Ashley and District Attorney Kent Lovern have also been communicating the need for a new courthouse complex.

Gov. Tony Evers put $25 million in his proposed two-year capital budget for the project. State legislators “have their own ideas about how to approach the project,” said Hertzberg. The county is also pursuing approximately $6 million in congressionally-directed spending at the federal level. 

Right now, discussions are focusing on state support for the project that could include changes to state funding mechanisms for county services. Specifically, some of the unique mandates the state requires only Milwaukee County to provide. One of the top examples, one county officials have long discussed, is the freeway patrol. Milwaukee is the only county that has to patrol its own freeways; the Wisconsin State Patrol is responsible for the rest. The state provides the county less than 10% of the cost for the patrols.

Hertzberg said the conversations remain “very dynamic,” but the message is picking up “traction” on both sides of the aisle.

The county expects some operational savings from a new courthouse. The Safety Building costs the county in staffing for the inefficiency it creates in the court system. But the county also has to budget approximately $500,000 annually to keep up with maintenance on the building. Utility system costs are also a drag on the budget. The old building includes a former jail that is no longer used, but must remain heated in the winter.

If the county doesn’t receive funding from the state in the next bienniel budget. “It really would impact the speed at which our consultants can move to move the project along,” said Jeremy Lucas, policy director in the county executive’s office.

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