Milwaukee County Executive. Running with Sarah Godlewski for lieutenant governor. Campaign affiliation: Democratic.
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Voter guide
Background, stated goals, record, and money
Background comes from official records, and from the campaign's own biography where the bullet says so; goals are summarized from the campaign's own platform and stay attributed; the record lines are official actions with the government source attached; money is shown as filed, with the filing window and the reconciliation in the note under the table, and is not evidence of why any position was taken.
Assembly Joint Resolution 10, filed February 24, 2017, states the Legislature's declaration that abortion is health care. Crowley is one of its 13 Assembly authors. It went to the Rules Committee and never got a vote.
Limit: A resolution states a view. It would not have changed any law.
David Crowley
Closing the Lincoln Hills youth prisons
Matches stated record claim
What they say
His campaign says he co-wrote legislation to close Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake, the state's youth prisons, and replace them with smaller sites closer to home.
“He co-authored legislation to close Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake”
In 2017 he co-wrote a bill for a youth facility in Milwaukee County, closer to home. It died. The 2018 law that ordered the closing had no named authors; a committee wrote it. He voted for it, and it passed the Assembly 95-0. In 2019 he co-wrote the follow-up law, 2019 Wisconsin Act 8, which kept the plan going and moved the closing deadline from January 1 to July 1, 2021.
County operations cut emissions 46 percent from 2005 to 2023, from 209,154 metric tons to 113,789. By 2019, the year before he took office, they were already down about 35 percent, to 136,347. About three-quarters of the drop came before he was county executive. In May 2026 the county put the cut at 48 percent through 2024.
Act 12 became law on June 20, 2023. It changed state aid to cities and counties and let Milwaukee County add a sales tax. Its authors were state lawmakers. He spoke at both committee hearings in May 2023, registered for information rather than for the bill. His written testimony backs it, calls it “truly historic progress” and says lawmakers spent “countless hours” with him and other local officials. In July the County Board passed the extra 0.4 percent county sales tax the Act allowed, and he signed it.