The Social Development Commission begins 2026 facing a mounting number of financial challenges.
The SDC board met Jan. 15 to discuss preliminary balance sheets and statements of change in net position for 2023 and 2024.
What the board members saw painted a picture of the agency’s difficult position after over a year of trying to regain funding to relaunch social services.
SDC stopped running its anti-poverty programs and laid off staff in April 2024. Since then, the agency has dealt with board turnover, lawsuits and the loss of access to community action funding.
“We’re down to about our last few thousand dollars,” said Jorge Franco, interim CEO of SDC and chair of the board, about SDC’s trust account when Commissioner Peter Fetzer asked if SDC had any money for legal counsel.
Franco stressed that the documents were not complete and still had hundreds of additional items to be reconciled, but could help the board gain a better understanding of its position.
Diane Robinson, SDC’s executive director and chief operating officer, estimated there was $17,000 in SDC’s trust account.
SDC has other assets, like its inventory, equipment and buildings, but it also has ongoing expenses and debts.
Priorities for SDC
Franco said after the meeting that SDC’s priority is restarting services for Milwaukee County residents living in poverty, followed by paying people who are owed money from SDC.
He said the board is discussing pathways to do that in whatever way it can, including options that would require SDC to scale down before it could grow.
“What SDC has is a tremendous amount of human capital experienced in delivering anti-poverty services at scale,” he said. “That’s an asset that simply cannot be replaced, cannot be discounted, cannot be dismissed.”
Franco said SDC has pursued money it is owed but has been blocked in some cases, including in its attempts to recover $489,000 from the Wisconsin Department of Administration.
“SDC currently now goes without being paid as well,” Franco said.
Board members asked questions about recovering payments owed to SDC, if there’s a cap on claims made against intergovernmental agencies and the value of the agency’s properties and other assets, before going into closed session to discuss legal claims.
Auction scheduled
A sheriff sale is scheduled for SDC’s main office, parking lots and warehouse on North Avenue at 10:30 a.m. Monday, Jan. 26 at the Milwaukee County Safety Building, 821 W. State St., Room B-12.
The buildings, owned by SDC’s property corporation, SD Properties Inc., entered into foreclosure after a hearing in October.
The SD Properties board met Monday Jan. 12, Franco said.
“The question we addressed was whether there was some strategy we wanted to deploy in an effort to save the assets, but it would only delay things in a costly manner, and the net outcome, based on our legal counsel, would end up being the same,” he said.
If there is interest in a sale before the auction sale is confirmed, SD Properties can still present it to the lender as an option, according to Franco.
New board member
Richard Diaz joined the board as a commissioner in December.
In an unusual change, Diaz was appointed to the Milwaukee Area Labor Council AFL-CIO seat, which had an active board member in Commissioner Pam Fendt.
Fendt, who is president of the labor council, said she realized that because Diaz is a member of the United Steel Workers Union in his job with the BlueGreen Alliance, he could represent the Milwaukee Area Labor Council on the board.
The United Way of Greater Milwaukee and Waukesha County, which has had a vacant seat on the SDC board for years, appointed Fendt to fill its board seat. She serves on the organization’s executive committee as a labor representative and on the board of directors.
“This helps us to fill out the board and have more shoulders to the wheel to see what SDC’s future could be,” Fendt said.
Both members were sworn in at the Milwaukee County Clerk’s Office on Dec. 1.
Upcoming meeting dates for the board can be found on the SDC website.
Meredith Melland is the neighborhoods reporter for the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and a corps member of Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues and communities. Report for America plays no role in editorial decisions in the NNS newsroom.
Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership between CatchLight Local and Report for America.
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