Brandi Grayson: Thirty-three empty chairs and one open door

I was a teenage girl in this county with nowhere safe to go.

I came through foster care. I became a mother before I was grown. Every system I touched had a file on me, and not one of them had a plan for me. Being known by a system and being protected by it are two very different things.

That girl was on my mind Tuesday night at Dane County’s Public Protection & Judiciary budget hearing, as I listened to the word emergency get used for jobs that have been empty for years. Somewhere in this county tonight, a girl is sitting where I sat. At 5:30, you can put her on the record.

You don’t need to understand budgets to understand this. Supervisor Heidi Wegleitner’s amendment, HHN O-2, would redirect $492,551 tied to three vacant deputy positions to restore housing navigation and case management at local nonprofits, including Urban Triage, the YWCA, and The Road Home. A separate proposal would redirect another $80,000 set aside for automated license plate readers, money the board put back after ending its Flock contract over data shared with agencies in at least eight states. Together, that’s $572,551 that could go to housing instead.

Tonight the public speaks. Next week the committees vote.

This is not an attack on deputies. I heard the testimony about overtime and burnout, and I believe it. I’ve worked 18- and 20-hour days. I don’t want an exhausted deputy carrying a gun any more than I want an exhausted housing navigator carrying a family’s last chance. Both things are true. I’m asking whether our budget will treat them both as true.

Follow the empty chairs

Last year, every county department was asked to cut 4%. The Sheriff’s Office asked for 3.5% more. The board froze 20 vacant deputy positions and counted $2.388 million in savings, money it knew couldn’t realistically be spent filling every vacancy that year. That amendment sent more than $800,000 to help run the new men’s shelter on Bartillon Drive and protected other homeless and human services. Nobody lost a job.

Freezing vacancies isn’t radical. For 2027, the Sheriff’s own office trimmed $1.8 million by leaving positions empty.

On Tuesday, Sheriff Kalvin Barrett testified that they couldn’t fill 13 vacancies in 2026 and are still working on it. With the frozen 20 returning in 2027, that’s 33 empty chairs. These proposals touch three, plus a camera budget nobody has spent.

Sit with that. An empty position doesn’t answer calls or keep anyone safe tonight. It’s a promise about the future. The 19-year-old running from violence isn’t the future. She’s tonight.

The new jail is expected to finish construction next year, and staffing it is a real need. That need deserves a real hiring plan, not money parked in chairs that have stayed empty for years. Last year’s freeze was temporary, and those positions came back in the 2027 budget. Supervisors can make that kind of decision again.

I’ll be honest about the cost. Holding three more positions vacant can slow recruiting, and the Sheriff would have to plan around it. That’s a real tradeoff. But no working deputy loses a job. And if the county needs those positions in a future budget, supervisors have the authority to reconsider them.

Now weigh what happens if housing isn’t funded. People who are homeless lose the phone that gets answered, the navigator at the table, the landlord who’ll take a chance on them. Then law enforcement loses too. When nobody supports shelters, day centers, and libraries, where people go when it’s cold, calls go to police. About 13% of jail bookings here already involve people presumed to be homeless. Officers end up doing navigation work with a badge and none of the tools.

A deputy testified that exhaustion makes bad interactions inside the jail more likely. I believe him. Now extend that understanding to the people on the other side of the encounter, carrying months of homelessness, violence and survival. Where is the concern for their capacity, their safety, their humanity?

What disappears with us

Urban Triage faces the largest housing cut in this budget: $321,520, about 20% of our entire budget. We’re the only Black-led organization in Dane County doing housing work, and we run the only open-door housing navigation program here. Most other programs are referral-only. Somebody has to send you. We’re who sends you.

Every month, we reach about 80 new, unduplicated people experiencing homelessness, close to 1,000 a year. Many never show up in shelter counts or day-center tallies. They’re in cars, on couches, in stairwells, at the library. We know they exist because every one of them is in our database, with a name and a need.

We’re at the day shelters, The Beacon, The Salvation Army, and the public libraries, and we’ll be inside the county’s new shelter. We hold workshops, show up to community meetings, and carry what we learn back to the people who need it. We maintain the online database and vacancy list that track housing across Madison. We hold agreements with landlords who will look past an old eviction because they trust us. We house chronically homeless people even though our contract never required it.

We aren’t the first organization to hold this contract, but we’re the first to hit these numbers. In the past year, we had 11,847 triage conversations by phone, text, and email. We made 71 permanent housing placements, and 85% of the people we serve were still housed as of August. When the DA’s office, police, Human Services, or another nonprofit doesn’t know where to send someone, they send them to us.

Let me tell you about Jada. She’s a composite. Her circumstances and the help she got reflect what we see again and again with many young people, with details changed to protect them.

Jada was 19 when she left the apartment where her mother’s boyfriend hit her. She slept on a friend’s couch, then in a car, then in a stairwell. Her ID was still in the apartment she ran from. She had an eviction on a lease her mother put in her name when she was 17. She never stayed in a shelter, so she never showed up in a count.

She found us at the library because we were already there. Our navigator replaced her ID and found a unit through our database. We vouched for her with a landlord who would have tossed her application, and we covered her security deposit and first month’s rent with donor money the county contract doesn’t pay for.

Jada has keys now. She kept her job. Under this budget, the next time Jada walks into that same library and finds an empty table.

I know what it means to exist in a system’s records and still be invisible to the people making decisions about your life. That’s why we built an organization that doesn’t wait for somebody to be counted, referred or approved before recognizing that they need help. That’s what Dane County is putting at risk. Not simply a contract. The ability to find people before another system finds them in crisis.

Here’s what people don’t see. The rest of our budget is restricted to specific programs that serve people referred in by name. County dollars staff the open door: the phones, the database, the footwork, the people out in the community. Without them, we stop answering housing calls, the database goes dark, and our support at The Beacon, The Salvation Army, and the libraries ends.

Here’s how $321,520 becomes much more. Those county dollars match our federal housing funding, so losing them puts roughly the same amount of federal dollars at risk.

And this next part isn’t a risk. It’s a certainty. Housing navigation is the staff. It’s the people in the community who do intakes, meet people where they are, and process the paperwork. Our Medicaid 1915(i) housing services run on that same staff. Without those staff, we may remain a Medicaid provider on paper, but we lose the capacity to deliver the services. A provider number doesn’t meet with a participant, complete an assessment, or help somebody find housing. People do.

The same goes for the $250,000 in unrestricted funds from Rooted and Wings that we use for security deposits, rent extensions, essentials, emergencies, placements at ECHO Suites, where we’re the only organization with an agreement, and young people fleeing domestic violence or just needing a safe place to stay. That money takes people to deploy. Without staff, it can’t reach the people it was meant for, and it moves somewhere else instead of to the most vulnerable people in this county.

Add it up, and what looks like $321,520 in savings on the county’s spreadsheet could jeopardize nearly $900,000 in housing funding and assistance, before we even account for the Medicaid services that depend on the same staff.

And the need is growing. Dane County’s one-night count rose from 624 people in 2023 to 790 in 2025, nearly 27% in two years. The pandemic money didn’t solve this. More than $94 million in rental assistance reached over 15,000 households, but most of it was built to keep people in homes they already had. When it ended, rent didn’t drop, and wages didn’t catch up. The emergency funding went away. The emergency stayed.

The politricks

Here’s the contradiction I can’t get past.

Last year’s freeze eliminated no working deputies. Not one. Yet the Sheriff publicly opposed it and rallied opposition on Facebook, and one supervisor called the budget reckless and urged a veto of what he called dangerous cuts to public safety.

So how did a decision that took no deputy off the street become a test of whether Dane County supports law enforcement, while eliminating housing services people are using right now gets called fiscal responsibility?

Stay with that question, because it explains this whole budget. When law enforcement asks, it’s treated as an obligation. When housing asks, it’s treated as a favor. One kind of cut gets called dangerous. The other gets called discipline.

Wegleitner wrote this amendment knowing exactly how last year’s version was framed. She wrote it anyway.

One supervisor put it best: county money isn’t any department’s personal pot. It’s one pie, and you recut it when circumstances change. It doesn’t belong to the Sheriff, or Human Services, or Urban Triage. It belongs to the people who live here.

Tonight

I’m not asking for charity. I’m asking for testimony.

Come if we ever answered your call or your text when you didn’t know who else to call. Come if we gave you a referral, sat with you at a shelter or library, found you a place, or covered your deposit. Come if we paid your rent for 12 or 18 months while you got your footing back. Come if you’ve ever sent someone to us because there was nowhere else.

And come if you’ve never needed us. Come if you’ve never wondered where you would sleep or whether your children would have somewhere safe to go. A community is not measured by how well it protects the people who have everything they need. It’s measured by what happens when somebody has nothing left, reaches for help, and finds out whether anyone is there. You don’t have to experience homelessness to understand that nobody should face it alone.

Supervisors can argue with a spreadsheet. It’s much harder to argue with a room full of people.

Health & Human Needs public hearing Tonight, Wednesday, October 14, 5:30 p.m. City-County Building, Room 351, 210 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., Madison

Come in person if you can. To speak by Zoom or phone, you must register by 5 pm here: zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_DFoNNBfeQ2yi9J_BirfnzQ. The agenda and amendments are here: dane.legistar.com.

You need three sentences: My name is ___. I live in Dane County. Housing is public safety, so support HHN O-2 and restore the housing cuts. If we helped you, add a fourth: Here’s what Urban Triage did for me.

If you want to push further, ask: If the county can count millions in savings from positions it cannot fill, what evidence justifies protecting three more vacant positions while eliminating housing services being delivered today?

The committee votes October 22, and Wegleitner will ask it to take public comment again that night. The full County Board also takes public testimony October 19 at 7 p.m. and November 2 at 6 p.m. If you truly can’t be there, email the supervisors at board.danecounty.gov/supervisors and name HHN O-2. But an email is the backup plan. Your voice in that room is what moves a vote.

A budget tells you what a government is willing to protect. Last year, Dane County froze empty chairs, cut no deputies, and used the savings to protect housing and shelter. It can make that choice again.

Somewhere in this county tonight, there’s a girl with a file and no plan. Dane County is deciding whether somebody will be there when she finally asks for help. Be in that room for her.

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