All 18 seats on the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors are up for election on April 7. Just three of the races are contested.
Patti Logsdon and Maqsood Khan are running for the District 9 seat.
What does a supervisor on the Milwaukee County Board do?
The board is Milwaukee County’s legislative body. One of its main responsibilities is to review, amend, and vote on the Milwaukee County budget each year. It also establishes programs, services and laws for the county and votes on executive nominations.
Each supervisor represents a different region of Milwaukee County on the board. If elected, supervisors serve two-year terms and are paid about $26,000 annually.
As a group, they make decisions that affect our parks, public transit, mental health services, and more.
Where is District 9?
District 9 covers Franklin, Hales Corners, and some of Greenfield. If you are unsure of which district you live in, you can look up your ballot here.
Who are the candidates?
WUWM interviewed the candidates. Their responses have been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the audio for the full conversation.
Maqsood Khan
Dr. Maqsood Khan is a gastroenterologist for Aurora Healthcare and also serves as an assistant professor of osteopathic medicine at the Des Moines School of Medicine.
He is a husband and father of five living in Franklin, where he is serving his second term on the school board.
I'm currently on the Franklin Public School Board and this is my second term. I have been the treasurer of the school board with my experience of having a balanced budget, where we are able to spend the taxes which we collect in a very concise manner, well-thought manner — at the same time, able to plan ahead. Which makes me, you know, wish to go ahead with that experience to the county level and hopefully help the County Board, address the same challenges they're facing.
What do you think are the two biggest issues for your district specifically and how would you address them?
The two biggest issues the residents of District 9 feel is that one, District 9 feels that we, being on the western part of the county, we are being neglected. The county roads are also — we are not getting bang for the buck for the taxes which we're paying.
The second thing which is important for District 9 is Hales Corners had a swimming pool which has been closed for the past eight years, and I believe that has been a very important resource for District 9 surrounding community, especially with the weathers, you know, summer becoming more hotter. I think that's an important resource to invest in, which I will be working on.
The Wisconsin Policy Forum has warned that Milwaukee County is likely to see increasingly painful budgets in the coming years. How would you work to balance the county budget without overburdening taxpayers?
So we have to be conscious in our spending and planning, as such. So for example, I'll give you a school board [example.] We have a debt, which we have been paying actively, but at the same time, we have been able to spend sufficiently in a manner in which decreases the school debt, but at the same time doesn't tax.
For example, in 2023, there was a proposition to increase the school tax levy to 13.2%, and I brought a resolution to decrease the tax levy to 5%. At the same time, under my leadership, we have been able to pay off some of the debt proactively, which has increased our credit rating from AA2 to AA1, which is best, which is just below the AAA. Because of that excellent credit rating, when we sold the bonds last year for the referendum of $145 million we were able to save $18 million.
So I think investing smartly, at the same time able to invest in the important resources which the community need. For example, I think from the Milwaukee County perspective, mental health — providing much-needed health services to the elderly are very important.
In January, the Board of Supervisors learned that the county's employee healthcare contract expired. How can the county rebuild trust with employees and taxpayers after such a big oversight?
I think being a healthcare professional, being a gastroenterologist and a practicing physician, healthcare is very, very important. Health insurance is very important for all the employees and the citizens of the community. I can't even fathom what kind of stress all the employees had to go through for a week, not knowing what's going to happen. I think this is definitely an oversight, and we need to be more cognizant, because there are more than 5,000 employees of the county who rely on the health insurance. So we have to be very proactive.
We have to ask tough questions to the persons responsible and have a regular input and briefings about what's happening, and not wait til the end of the time when it's all of a sudden known that — hey, what's happening — and that, that it was not renewed.
So I think being proactive and planning ahead, asking tough questions, and meeting maybe getting a briefing, twice a year, what's happening with the health insurance.
I think one of the ways to build the trust is that showing to the community that we are making all the efforts that this doesn't happen again, which can be done easily. Have a briefing maybe quarterly, or at least twice a year of where do we stand with the health insurance and how are you planning so that this kind of mistakes does not happen?
What would you do differently as a County Board member?
So as a County Board member, once selected, I will approach across the aisles and work with each and every supervisor, build up relationship. Because we have to understand whether it's a school board, whether it's County Board, relationships matters, how you approach people matters, how you work with people matters.
To get the things done, which I have successfully done at the school board level, I think I would like to get the same experience and move forward and building up bridges, building up trust between supervisors and trust between, from the community, as such. Right now, unfortunately, the community has lost the trust and the current leadership of not able to even, you know, address a simple issue of Hales Corners pool, which had been closed for the past seven years under the current leadership of eight years of my current supervisor.
Patti Logsdon (incumbent)
Patti Logsdon currently serves at the District 9 supervisor and was first elected in April of 2018. She serves as the chair of the Personnel Committee and is a member of the Community, Environment, and Economic Development Committee and the Judiciary, Law Enforcement, and General Services Committee.
What makes you prepared for the job of county supervisor?
I represent Milwaukee County in the 9th district, and I was first elected in 2018. I have over 35 years of accounting experience and finance, and I hold a master's degree in accounting from Alverno College. I've been active locally as a poll worker, youth coach, leader of nonprofit boards including the Milwaukee Child Welfare Partnership Council. I was married for 38 years and my husband passed, and I'm the proud mother of two children and four grandchildren.
I'm a lifelong resident of Milwaukee County, and I've spoken publicly of my deep commitment to servicing community and to serve with fairness, integrity, and transparency.
What are the two biggest issues for your district specifically, and how do you plan to address them?
My top priorities on the County Board are public safety, transparency, and the protection and investment in our Milwaukee County parks.
You can check my past and some of my accomplishments of public safety. I've done a resolution to ensure repairs to bridges in my district that were crumbling and damaged. I've done my best for safety upgrades at a school crossing that was very dangerous.
I worked to make a resolution to have additional park rangers available in our parks to handle any situations that are needed and necessary for the safety of our community. I work very closely with our sheriff's department to help ensure that they get the means to help them to make the safety of our community possible.
I actually was very concerned of the lack of correctional officers and the lack of sheriffs that we were getting, and we had a great shortage, which is a safety factor. I, along with another supervisor did a resolution and we were able to increase the salaries for these positions, which brought in more people to apply for the jobs.
The Wisconsin Policy Forum warned that Milwaukee County is likely to see increasingly painful budgets in the coming years. How do you plan to work to balance the county budget without overburdening taxpayers?
That is a good question and being an accountant, I look at all the oversight. I realize you have to make some cuts that make some departments not happy, but we have to make them. It's a difficult decision.
Now, you understand the state has mandates for us. One of the mandates is, you know, we have to parole our highways, which takes a lot of our revenue from our sheriff's department. We have to first go with our mandates, and all the priority that we have to put in the budget, and then there's not much left to sift through.
I authored a resolution last year about transparency. I did this because I feel Milwaukee County supervisors do not get all the information that we need. So with this transparency resolution, I am also asking that each department do dashboards and they keep us as supervisors informed so we are not surprised when we find out that they are in a deficit or there's issues that we need to be aware of.
In January, the Board of Supervisors learned that the county's employee healthcare contract expired, and you had to rush to approve a new one. So how can the county rebuild trust with employees and taxpayers after such an oversight?
I'll give you a little insight. I had scheduled my monthly committee meeting in February and we had our meeting, and a week later, I get this request from the HR department to add an agenda item about the health insurance. I already had my meeting, it was done. You can't go back and add something in. They also submitted it to the finance committee, and they had not had their meeting as yet, so they were able to discuss it. I encouraged my committee members to show up at the finance committee meeting or listen virtually so we are aware of what the situation is. After this meeting and listening to the issues and the problems, I decided we needed to hold a joint emergency meeting between personnel and finance to get to the bottom of why this is happening.
I and the supervisor of finance, Willie Johnson, called the emergency meeting and shared it. At the meeting, we started it with, "We are here for a fact-finding mission."
We wanted no grandstanding, no finger pointing, and we wanted decorum.
So the first people we brought up was — what I will call the nuclei of this situation — was our controller because she made us all aware of this by letting us know that she has not signed the contract as yet because she had asked and requested an audit to the contract with the healthcare provider. Now, the healthcare agreement was actually written up in May of 2025. We were to pay $9 million. We paid out the $9 million ahead of time. I just wanna put out there that our employees were covered. This was paid for. They never lost insurance. There was never a lapse in insurance.
So, we had him do a timeline to find out when did you request this extra information about the extra edit for the audit contract, and it was requested around that time, and the person in HR that was required to do that follow-through with this information to get the answers was not getting it from UnitedHealth. They stated "We have an audit that we already provided you with, and they don't do another one." They have a company that provides it and that is what they send out, so they would not add this extra information to the audit.
As a result, the controller would not sign this. If you read our state statutes, it states in there that officers and officials of organizations, Milwaukee County have to abide by policies and one of the policies is she had to know that everything that she had required was in this contract before she would sign it. She's doing her job. So she brought this out to us.
So there were the three people that were called up to speak at the meeting, as I called up our controller, our audit person, and then one of the accountants that are part of this gathering of information. We really didn't get all the right answers.
We have, as a group, decided we need to do an audit of the whole situation so this never occurs again. So that's where we're at.
During your time as a supervisor, what do you think you've done well and what would you still like to accomplish if re-elected?
I'm on three committees as I stated, and being on these committees, I have kept foresight into what is going on and what I can do to prevent things from happening. I'll give you one example.
I was on the Judiciary Committee. As a result of being on the committee, this was during COVID-19. You have an option with the county exec can take our emergency powers from us for a limited amount of time and the emergency powers kept going and it was a year later, almost two years later, and the Judiciary Committee is the designated committee in times of emergency to be able to follow through with procedures and mandates, and we wanted our power back, so we fought hard for it, and it took a while, and that shouldn't have happened.
I worked to make out a resolution so this would not happen with my fellow supervisors in the future and I have gone one step above that.
One of the supervisors on that Judiciary Committee is now a state rep and I spoke with her and I said, what can we do from the state side to make sure this not doesn't not only happen ever again to a committee and Milwaukee County supervisors, but to other municipalities in Wisconsin. So we wrote up a resolution bill in Madison. It was, a legislative bill AB 306, and the Senate bill number was 310.
So I went up to Madison. I spoke to the house and I spoke to the Senate regarding this. We got a lot of co-sponsors added on to this and it passed.
Is there anything else that you would like to talk about, that may be important for voters to keep in mind?
I have been advocating hard and relentlessly to open up the pool in Hales Corners. I have done everything I could. I've done resolutions. I've done amendments. Last year, I did an amendment where they came in and they filled the pool, make sure it was in working order, and it's a beautiful pool. But Milwaukee County, as we stated before, has issues with our priorities and our monies, and they decided that they were going to close this pool.
So I am working with a group who are talking about leasing the park and leasing that area and opening up that pool. Again, this is all in the works right now, but I am going to follow through and make sure that pool does get open.
Secondly, I really would like to finish up a project I've been working on since 2021. I'm working with the friends group at Boerner Botanical Gardens to put a decorative high fence around the gardens. The reason being we have a lot of deer damage that come in there and graze on our plants. We have a lot of people coming in there at night with their dogs and not picking up what they should. We have issues of theft at night.
I understand that progress sometimes takes persistence, collaboration, and patience, especially when navigating large systems and competing priorities. My district, District 9, comes first, and I advocate for them.
