Governance, Oversight, and What Comes Next

SaveMPM.org — Collections & Public Trust Series

A street-level view inside the European Village at the Milwaukee Public Museum, 800 West Wells Street. The exhibit was built into the structure of the current building and cannot be relocated to the new facility. Photo courtesy of the Virtual Museum of Natural and Human History / Flickr.

Who Has Authority Over Publicly Owned Collections, What They Can Do About It, and Why the Window May Be Closing

The five posts in this series have traced the history of a framework — the language, the ethics, and the law of public trust stewardship — that was built over three centuries to ensure that objects given to the public in trust would actually remain in the public's hands. Post 1 described where the language came from. Post 2 traced the genealogy of held in trust as a legal and ethical concept. Post 3 examined the specific problem of built environments and dioramas. Post 4 looked at the documentation record and what the paper trail at MPM actually shows.

This final post asks the practical question: given everything we now know, who has the authority to act, what can they do, and how much time is there?

The answer is that the authority exists, the mechanisms are available, and the window — while not yet closed — is narrowing.

1. The Governance Structure at MPM

The Milwaukee Public Museum operates under a governance structure that was designed to balance public ownership with private management. Milwaukee County owns the building, the land, and — under the 2013 Lease and Management Agreement — the collections held in public trust. MPM Inc., the private nonprofit, manages the institution, raises private funds, and makes operational decisions under the terms of the lease.

This structure is common in American museums. Many public museums are owned by government entities but managed by private nonprofits. The governance framework is designed to give institutions operational flexibility while preserving public accountability for the assets involved.

What is not common — and what the MPM situation has exposed — is the adoption of a Disposition Plan that applies collections management terminology to assets those terms were never defined to cover, claims authority the governing documents do not grant, and proposes to retain proceeds in a way the policy explicitly prohibits. The 2025 Plan for Disposition (File No. 25-586) was adopted by the MPM Inc. Board of Directors without a vote of the Milwaukee County Board, without triggering review by the Wisconsin Attorney General, and without public disclosure of how its claims compare to the policy and LMA it purports to operate under.

The 2021 Collections Policy (File No. 21-259) is clear: Milwaukee County holds title to the collections. The Non-Accessioned Collections category covers Archives, Library, Photograph, Education, and teaching materials. Proceeds from any disposition must be held in a restricted fund for direct care and acquisition of collections only. The policy explicitly prohibits departments from creating individualized policy in conflict with it. The Disposition Plan conflicts with all of these provisions. This is the governance gap at the heart of the MPM situation.

2. What Milwaukee County Can Do

Milwaukee County, as the legal owner of the museum's collections and the lessor of the building, has substantial authority to act. That authority has not yet been exercised.

The County Board can demand a complete accounting of the 2025 Disposition Plan — specifically, a legal analysis of whether its application of 'non-accessioned' and 'Personal Property' to built environments and historic exhibits is consistent with the definitions those terms carry in the 2021 Collections Policy and the 2013 Lease and Management Agreement. The Collections Policy states that Milwaukee County holds title to the Museum collections. The LMA's 'Personal Property' definition covers only operational equipment and supplies, explicitly excluding Artifacts. If MPM Inc. is claiming that the Streets of Old Milwaukee and the European Village fall within these categories, that claim deserves formal legal scrutiny — not administrative acceptance.

The County Board can also note that the 2021 Collections Policy itself states it may not be 'altered or amended without proper approvals' and that no department may 'create or implement individualized policy' in conflict with it. If the Disposition Plan constitutes such an individualized policy — applying terms in ways the policy does not authorize — the County Board has standing to challenge it on that basis alone. The County's interest in built environments constructed with County-funded labor, in a County-owned building, does not disappear because a private nonprofit has issued a plan claiming otherwise.

The County can require that the Wisconsin Attorney General review the 2021 policy change and its consistency with MPM Inc.'s obligations as the manager of a charitable institution holding public assets. This request can come from the County Board, from individual County supervisors, or from members of the public.

3. What the Wisconsin Attorney General Can Do

In the United States, nonprofit corporations are regulated at the state level, and the primary oversight authority is the state attorney general. The Wisconsin Attorney General has broad authority to investigate and take action when charitable assets — which museum collections are, legally — are improperly managed, diverted, or disposed of.

The doctrine of cy pres — a legal principle governing charitable assets — holds that assets given for a specific public purpose cannot simply be redirected to another use when that purpose can no longer be served. They must be transferred to another institution with a similar public mission, or used for the most similar available purpose. Applied to museum collections, this means that objects donated for the benefit of the Milwaukee public cannot simply be sold at auction to fund a building transition.

The Attorney General can investigate whether the 2025 Disposition Plan constitutes an improper diversion of charitable assets — specifically, whether its claim that MPM Inc. may sell historic exhibit environments and retain proceeds for building transition costs is consistent with the Collections Policy's explicit requirement that all disposal proceeds be held in a restricted fund for direct care and acquisition of collections only. That requirement appears in both the 2016 and 2021 versions of the policy, unchanged, and the 2021 version explicitly states the fund accrues indefinitely and shall not be spent on short-term purposes. The Attorney General can review donor records for the built environments to determine whether any materials were given under representations of permanent public stewardship. And the Attorney General can seek injunctive relief to prevent disposition while that review is underway.

Filing a formal complaint with the Wisconsin Attorney General's office is something any member of the public can do. The complaint does not require legal representation and can be based on the publicly available documents: the 2021 Collections Policy (File No. 21-259), the 2013 Lease and Management Agreement, and the Plan for Disposition (File No. 25-586).

4. What the AAM Can Do

The American Alliance of Museums accredits the Milwaukee Public Museum. Accreditation is a voluntary status, but it carries significant practical weight: accredited museums are preferred for loans, grants, and institutional partnerships. Losing accreditation is a serious professional and operational consequence.

The AAM's accreditation standards require museums to maintain collections management policies consistent with the Code of Ethics for Museums. Those standards include the prohibition on using collection sales to fund operating expenses or capital campaigns. They include the requirements of transparency and public accountability. They include the obligation to honor the public trust.

The AAM has, in the past, sanctioned or decertified institutions that violated its standards — most notably in cases involving improper deaccessioning. The Berkshire Museum, which sold significant collection objects to fund a building renovation, faced intense AAM scrutiny and public censure.

The question of whether the 2025 Disposition Plan's application of collections management terminology — using 'non-accessioned' and 'Personal Property' to cover historic built environments and world-first dioramas in ways neither term is defined to cover in the governing documents — is consistent with AAM accreditation standards is one the AAM itself should be asked to address directly. Formal inquiries to the AAM can be submitted by members of the public, by museum professionals, and by County officials.

5. What the Public Can Do

Public pressure is not a substitute for legal and administrative action, but it is not nothing either. The Street of Old Milwaukee survived in part because of intense community attachment. The petition drives launched by Milwaukee residents collected thousands of signatures. The Facebook group dedicated to the Streets of Old Milwaukee has tens of thousands of members. These are not trivial expressions of nostalgia; they are evidence that the public understands these environments to be its heritage.

Attending Milwaukee County Board meetings and requesting that the Board examine the 2025 Disposition Plan — specifically whether its claims about 'non-accessioned' and 'Personal Property' are consistent with the 2021 Collections Policy and 2013 LMA — is a direct exercise of democratic accountability. Submitting public records requests for the Disposition Plan's supporting legal analysis, the board minutes at which it was approved, and the communications between MPM Inc. and Milwaukee County about the transition builds the evidentiary record that oversight requires.

Contacting the Wisconsin Attorney General's office, the AAM, and elected officials at the state and local level puts the issue on the record and creates the institutional pressure that makes administrative review more likely.

And telling the stories of the objects and environments at stake — the families who donated materials to the Streets, the community groups who built the European Village, the generations of Milwaukee children who visited the Rainforest on school field trips — is what gives the abstract principles of public trust their human weight.

Conclusion: The Framework Exists. The Question Is Whether It Will Be Used.

The public trust framework — the laws, the professional ethics, the governance structures, the oversight mechanisms — was built precisely for situations like this. It exists because the history of cultural institutions is full of moments when assets that belonged to the public were quietly redirected to other purposes, when administrative claims were used to accomplish what transparency would have prevented, when the language of stewardship was invoked to justify the transfer of public wealth into private hands.

The framework works when people use it. The Wisconsin Attorney General has authority that has not been invoked. The Milwaukee County Board has oversight responsibility that has not been exercised. The AAM has accreditation standards that have not been applied. The courts have jurisdiction that has not been tested.

The window is not closed. The Streets of Old Milwaukee still exists. The European Village still exists. The built environments that generations of Milwaukeeans experienced as their collective heritage — the world's first walk-through diorama, the world's first life-size dinosaur habitat, the immigrant streets that told the story of how this city was built — are still there.

But the Disposition Plan is in place. The new building is under construction. And the 2021 Collections Policy — which says Milwaukee County holds title, which limits 'Non-Accessioned Collections' to Archives and educational media, which requires proceeds to be held in a restricted fund for collection care only, and which explicitly prohibits individualized policy that conflicts with it — has not been followed. The mechanisms of the public trust framework do not operate automatically; they require people with standing to invoke them and officials with authority to act on them.

SaveMPM will continue to document what the public records show, to identify the specific decisions that can still be challenged, and to provide the information that Milwaukee residents need to understand what has been proposed for their heritage and what can still be done to protect it.

The collections of the Milwaukee Public Museum belong to the people of Milwaukee. The policy says so. The LMA says so. History says so. And it is worth fighting for.

SaveMPM.org — Collections & Public Trust Series

Post 5 of 5. Freely reproducible with attribution.

SaveMPM.org documents the Milwaukee Public Museum transition — examining public records, governance agreements, and asset classification decisions that affect publicly owned collections, exhibits, and historic environments.