Milwaukee County has seen a number of higher-level administrators leave their posts over the past year.
At least six top officials and key administrators under Milwaukee County Executive and gubernatorial candidate David Crowley have resigned or been fired since June 2025.
Some of the resignations and firings stem from recent administrative blunders. Other departures have been murkier, raising calls for more transparency from some members of the county’s Board of Supervisors.
“There’s a lot unraveling with many key leaders,” Supervisor Kathleen Vincent said. She added: “It leads me to wonder who’s making these decisions.”
Crowley’s spokesperson Jonathan Fera said leadership turnover is not unusual for any administration and said Crowley has continued to “prioritize services” for Milwaukee County residents.
Fera declined to discuss details surrounding each person’s departure, citing employee privacy.
Here is what we know about the recent departures:
Abrupt resignation of two mental health officials raises questions
Two leaders of Milwaukee County’s Behavioral Health Services division, Mike Lappen and John Schneider, resigned in March 2026 and July 2025, respectively.
Both resignations were abrupt.
Lappen, the division’s administrator, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in April he was asked to resign and given no reason other than the county wanting to “go in another direction.”
Lappen’s departure shocked many on the Milwaukee County Mental Health Board, a volunteer-run committee that oversees the division’s policies and budgets. At an April board meeting, members questioned the county’s lack of communication about the decision.
In response, Crowley’s chief of staff, Mary Jo Meyers, told board members that the decision represented the county executive’s vision and asked members to reconsider whether they wanted to continue serving on the board.
The year prior, Schneider, the division’s treatment director, also resigned suddenly.
Schneider has not spoken publicly about his resignation.
However, his departure came shortly after Behavioral Health Services accidentally released a Greenfield man charged with homicide back into the community without notifying the courts. The man had been placed in the custody of Behavioral Health Services after being deemed incompetent to stand trial.
At the time, Crowley told WISN-TV that the case may have played a role in Schneider’s resignation.
In a recent interview, Mary Neubauer, a recently retired Mental Health Board member, asked for more transparency.
“Did the County Executive ultimately make these decisions, or did his chief of staff make the decisions?” Neubauer asked.
Transit deficit blunder leads to resignation of two transportation officials
In July 2025, two top transportation officials resigned after revealing that the agency running the county’s bus system faced a nearly $11 million deficit at the time, pushing a looming fiscal cliff much closer than previously anticipated.
The deficit led to major route and service reductions, fare increases and the subsequent departure of Donna Brown-Martin, executive director of the county’s Department of Transportation since 2018, and Julie Esch, the bus agency’s interim president and CEO.
The county’s Department of Transportation oversees and manages the bus system, which is run by the quasi-governmental agency Milwaukee County Transit Services.
Emails later obtained by the Journal Sentinel showed Brown-Martin and Esch had kept county leadership in the dark for roughly four months, despite policies requiring immediate reports of major deficits.
The emails also showed angry rebukes from Crowley’s office, particularly from Meyers, who slammed the agency’s failure to notify leadership of the deficit in advance.
“There were countless missteps along the way, which forced hurried communication resulting in damage to all of our reputations, public trust issues for the [County Executive], as well as fallout from the Board which landed in the paper,” Meyers wrote in a June 23 email.
The emails also show a three-week lag between when county administrators learned of the potential for a deficit and when county supervisors and the public were alerted. At the time, county spokespeople said MCDOT hadn’t initially provided them with many details on the full size and scope of the deficit.
Health care contract lapse leads to one termination, and questions loom over another resignation
In early February, Crowley announced the termination of an employee tied to a lapse in one of the county’s largest contracts, covering employee health care benefits.
That employee was later identified as Human Resources benefits director Tony Maze, who was in charge of negotiating the roughly $450 million contract.
Before his termination, Maze was grilled by supervisors at a Jan. 29 finance committee meeting, where he informed them that the contract had lapsed one month prior at the end of 2025, briefly putting employee health care administration on shaky ground.
The board was able to renew the previous contract exactly one week later, on Feb. 5.
Roughly three months after the incident, Maze’s boss, Chief Human Resources Officer Margo Franklin, sent a letter to supervisors on April 22, announcing her resignation.
It is not clear what led to Franklin’s resignation. It came shortly after she raised concerns to the administration about possible misconduct, which are under investigation, according to a spokesperson for Crowley’s office.
The spokesperson said her resignation was “a personal decision” not related to the contract lapse or an ongoing audit of contracts initiated after the lapse.
How do county supervisors view the recent departures?
Supervisor Steve Taylor, who was first elected in 2012, said he finds the level of turnover among higher-level county staff over the last year abnormal and said many of them were “tied to controversies.”
Taylor said Crowley’s run for governor, first floated in July of 2025, puts more work on the county executive’s plate and draws him away from his desk more frequently, although he added that he does not believe the campaign is the reason behind recent administrative blunders.
“I just wish they were more upfront or more transparent,” Taylor said.
He largely blamed staff in the county executive’s office for the lack of transparency.
“This is not David Crowley,” he said. “David Crowley is not the one putting up barriers and holding back the information. It’s people in his office.”
Crowley’s predecessor, Chris Abele, also saw some notable turnover across his tenure. Eight high-ranking managers during Abele’s first two years either resigned or were fired, as reported by the Milwaukee Magazine in 2013.
Fera, Crowley’s spokesperson, denied that Crowley’s gubernatorial campaign is distracting from his work as the county executive. Crowley, who was first elected in 2020, is committed and “fully engaged in the decisions of his administration,” Fera said in an email.
Former Gov. Scott Walker also ran for the office while serving as Milwaukee County executive.
Supervisor Justin Bielinski said he doesn’t feel the turnover has been excessive, but feels frustrated by a lack of transparency surrounding some of the decisions.
In particular, Bielinski highlighted the lingering questions surrounding Lappen’s resignation and the board’s inability to question Esch and Brown-Martin about the transit deficit after their abrupt resignations.
Meanwhile, Supervisor Shawn Rolland said the departures are evidence of Crowley’s high standards for accountability when something goes awry.
Rolland pointed out positive recalibrations after the transit and health care blunders: a re-stabilized health care administration contract, the pending reports re-examining other HR contracts, ongoing plans to make the bus system more fiscally sustainable, new investments in bus safety and BHS’s harms reduction efforts in lowering opioid deaths.
“The process issues have made for great headlines, but we’re seeing great results, and those deserve to be great headlines just as much, if not more,” he said.
The county’s workforce is more effective and diverse than ever before, Rolland said.
He noted that the county’s retention rate for full-time employees was 88% in 2025, up 1.2% above the 2024 rate of 86.8%, according to Human Resources data.
Claudia Levens is a local government reporter. Contact her at clevens@usatodayco.com. Follow her on X at @levensc13.
Eva Wen is an investigative data journalist. Reach her at qwen@usatodayco.com.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Milwaukee County supervisors call for transparency over resignations
Reporting by Claudia Levens and Eva Wen, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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