Milwaukee's Common Council unanimously adopted a $2.27 billion budget for 2027 on Friday, and buried in the numbers is a pointed shift of priorities: $2.5 million pulled from the Milwaukee Police Department, with $1.6 million of that coming straight out of MPD's vehicle account and landing in the Fire Department's budget to buy a new fire engine.
The vote, confirmed by jsonline.com, redirected funding from the Police Department as part of the broader spending plan. The amendment that sent police vehicle dollars to the Fire Department passed with support from 12 council members, while Scott Spiker, Peter Burgelis and JoCasta Zamarripa voted against it. The full $2.27 billion budget itself, however, cleared the council unanimously.
CBS58 reported that the budget plan would give the Fire Department one new fire engine, funded by a transfer from the Police Department. The move follows weeks of public reporting on just how threadbare MFD's equipment budget had become heading into 2027.
A Department Warning of an Aging Fleet
Mayor Cavalier Johnson's original proposed budget had included no funding at all for new fire trucks, according to the same reporting. That proposal came even as MFD had requested nearly $61 million for equipment and facility improvements, with the mayor's plan including $3 million for facility needs, per reporting from wtmj.com.
Fire Chief Aaron Lipski had been blunt about what that funding gap meant for the department's trucks and engines. “We have a ton of vehicles that are already pushing up against 20 years. We have a ton that are at or beyond 15 years,” Lipski said, according to the outlet's report. He also noted that ordering a new vehicle doesn't mean it shows up quickly: “We're in some cases two, two and a half, three years out from the time we cut the contract to get that vehicle in our fleet,” he said.
The mayor's original proposal did include money to reopen Fire Station 6 near Brady Street, a station that had sat closed since 2018, the same report noted. That detail, like the rest of the proposed plan's equipment gap, had set the stage for the council's eventual decision to carve out police funding specifically for a fire engine.
Staffing Shifts on Both Sides of Public Safety
The budget fight has also touched staffing levels at both departments. The mayor's proposal called for adding 15 firefighter positions, which would raise MFD's daily minimum staffing level from 207 to 211, according to Urban Milwaukee. That staffing bump was projected to put one additional heavy apparatus in service each day.
MFD had actually requested staffing for two additional apparatus groups rather than one, but funding just one instead of two was expected to save the city more than $1 million compared with the department's full request, Urban Milwaukee reported. On the police side, the proposed budget funded three MPD recruit classes of up to 65 recruits each, with the administration projecting the department's average sworn strength would tick up by 14 officers, from 1,565 in 2026 to 1,579 in 2027, after accounting for retirements and other attrition.
What isn't yet clear is when Milwaukee's new fire engine will actually be ordered, what it will cost, or when it might arrive at a station. The adopted budget identifies the $1.6 million redirected from police vehicles to the Fire Department, but the procurement timeline — which Lipski has said can stretch two to three years from contract to delivery — has not been laid out publicly.
