City officials last week made a minor adjustment intending to clarify rules covering where convicted sex offenders can live in Shawano, but the change won’t impact the state’s plans to open a temporary placement facility for recently released felons in a residential neighborhood.
The state Department of Corrections is in the final stages of formalizing an agreement with Milwaukee-based Matt Talbot Recovery Services to operate the six-bed facility at 118 S. Union St. It would house recently released offenders, including convicted sex offenders.
The facility is an allowable use under the city’s zoning code, which conforms with state statutes for such facilities, and is not within 2,000 feet of any other community-based residential facility, which would otherwise have required the city’s approval.
The city does have an ordinance restricting where sex offenders can live within the city limits, but it does have an exception — in compliance with state law — for Department of Corrections facilities.
The ordinance prohibits convicted sex offenders from living within 1,500 feet of any facility where children are likely to congregate, including any facility used for or that supports a school for children, licensed day care center, library, park, recreational trail, playground or place of worship.
According to the ordinance, the exception kicks in if the convicted sex offender “has been placed in a temporary living center by the Department of Corrections under electronic monitoring and said person meets with the Sexual Predator Ordinance Committee as requested.”
The Shawano Common Council’s action last week removed a subsequent paragraph in the ordinance that failed to specify the conditions of electronic monitoring and meeting with the committee.
City Attorney Tim Schmid said state law restricts what limitations municipalities can place on Department of Corrections facilities, and there are moves afoot in Madison to make it even harder for local government to limit where convicted sex offenders can live.
“There seems to be a move within the state to potentially restrict municipalities’ ability to adopt these type of ordinances,” Schmid said.
He said a bill introduced in the Assembly could prevent municipalities from adopting any kind of restrictions.
“We might lose the authority to do what we’re trying to do here,” he said.
“Contact needs to be made with the Department of Corrections to express your frustration and lack of ability to do anything, and with state legislators who adopted state law that basically allows the Department of Corrections to place these facilities in areas where the city has nothing to say about it,” Schmid said.
Shawano Police Lt. Dan Mauel, who serves on the city’s sexual predator ordinance committee, said the DOC facility could house all types of recently released felons, not just sex offenders.
He said very few of the sex offenders who have come before the committee were convicted of violent offenses.
“There have been a lot of 18-year-olds convicted of having consensual sex with a 16-year-old or 17-year-old girlfriend,” he said. “They were arrested for that and now they’re on the sexual offender registry for life.”
Most, he said, are trying to get their lives back on track and unlikely to re-offend.
“They come before (the committee), and they’re working, they’re trying hard, they’re not getting in trouble,” Mauel said. “If I had a house like that next to me, I’d rather have these type of sexual offenders living in it than property crime people. I think the property crime people re-offend more than the sexual offenders do.”
Mauel also said if sexual offenders are denied a place to live where they can be monitored, they will go underground.
“At least this way we know where they are,” he said.
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