MADISON – Damaging audits released Monday show how violent assaults spiked at Scott Walker’s mental health hospital as he slashed budgets and staff, leaving patients dearly in peril, and how county buildings, including Mitchell Field and the War Memorial, have been left unsafe by Walker’s reckless policy of cutting inspections, resulting in a “haphazard” approach.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel also found that Scott Walker not only is refusing to cooperate with his county auditor, from whom he has hid a damaging report, but will be taken to federal court and sued by a disability rights group for records he has refused them from the mental health facility.
Walker also has refused to cooperate with several probes into the center, where starvation deaths, preventable drug overdoses and sexual assaults have grabbed headlines- and kept Walker ducking for cover.
Meanwhile, the inspections audit assigned no blame in the deadly incident this June at O’Donnell Park, in which a 15-year-old boy was killed, and a woman was gravely injured, when a concrete slab fell off. Walker recently flip-flopped and said, contrary to his early and self-serving opposition, that he seeks an independent probe into the accident.
The audit did find that only two-thirds of county buildings have been inspected in the last decade, and that dangerous conditions abound, as Walker has cut funding for county inspections.
Here are the direct links to both full audits:
http://county.milwaukee.gov/ImageLibrary/Groups/cntyAudit/Report1019.pdf
http://county.milwaukee.gov/ImageLibrary/Groups/cntyAudit/Report1020.pdf
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