1994 City of Milwaukee Budget

ARCW initiated its advocacy for City of Milwaukee AIDS funding in 1993 with a $190,000 AIDS funding proposal entitled the Milwaukee AIDS Initiative. ARCW recruited five other agencies providing AIDS services in Milwaukee to join a coalition with ARCW to secure and receive City funding through the Milwaukee AIDS Initiative. HIV services to be funded by the initiative included HIV education and prevention outreach, testing, and case management, food services, housing services, and legal services. Despite initial opposition from Mayor John Norquist, the proposal was eventually funded.

In the 1995 city budget, ARCW advocacy was required when the Personnel and Finance Committee of the Common Council cut $69,200 in historic ARCW AIDS prevention funding from the budget. Following an intensive lobby effort with Council members, ARCW won a major victory to restore the proposed cut and also to retain the Milwaukee AIDS Initiative.

In the 1997 city budget ARCW lobbied for a new funding initiative called the Milwaukee Partnership to Stop AIDS which would bring the City of Milwaukee into partnership with Milwaukee County, the State of Wisconsin, and private sector donors in a comprehensive prevention strategy to reduce HIV infection among the Milwaukee’s 6,000 injection drug users. In total, it was a $1 million program with the City of Milwaukee contributing new funding of $100,000. The Common Council and the Mayor eventually supported an additional $50,000 in AIDS funding for the Milwaukee AIDS Initiative, bringing its total funding to $240,000.

In spring 1993 the City of Milwaukee experienced a severe contamination of its drinking water with cryptosporidium causing extreme gastrointestinal and diarrheal illness for 400,000 residents. During the crisis, 92 AIDS patients died.

ARCW provided its clients with clean water, and advised them not to drink Milwaukee tap water and to monitor their health in collaboration with Milwaukee area physicians. ARCW also worked with Milwaukee’s City Health Department, Common Council, and Mayor to secure their acknowledgement of the life-threatening nature of cryptosporidiosis for AIDS patients and their cooperation in offering specific recommendations for avoiding and managing cryptosporidiosis among immune compromised individuals.