Black Women Provide Leadership to the Madison Common Council: Historic Leadership (Part 2 of 3)
Sabrina Madison (r) is the president of the Madison Common Council and Carmella Glenn is the vice-president.
by Jonathan Gramling
In 2018, Alder Samba Baldeh was elected president of the Madison Common Council and Alder Sheri Carter was elected vice-president of the council. It was the first time that two people of color occupied the top leadership positions of the council simultaneously.
In 2026, eight years later, history somewhat repeated itself when two Black women were elected to the positions, District 17 Alder Sabrina Madison as president and District 18 Alder Carmella Glenn. They are both east side representatives as well.
In addition to her duties as an alder serving her constituents and keeping her finger on the pulse of her constituents’ opinions on city issues, Madison stays busy helping to conduct the city’s business.
“I’m on the finance committee,” Madison said. “I’m on the city-county homeless issues committee. Of course I’m on the Common Council Executive Committee. I’m on the library board. The library board will always be my favorite committee outside of finance and CCEC.”
And while Glenn sees her vice-presidency as supporting Madison’s priorities, she is also busy working on issues facing the city.
“We talked a lot, especially the first month or so about ideas we have for moving forward on the Common Council Executive Committee, which has the president, the vice-president and a few chosen alders,” Glenn said. “That’s where you get into what we are going to do, our ideas around community. Sabrina is very community-led too. We discussed maybe having a Common Council in the community or one of the BCCs, one of the boards, commissions or committees, in the community. It’s just ideas and then we have a weekly meeting with chief of staff, talking through all of the things we are hearing in the community. And then you just get a lot more emails too. You’re copied on everything.”
And Glenn also has some issues that she is following and advocating for.
“For the northside specifically, this year I think for all of us, we’re going to be wrapping up some of the area plans,” Glenn said. “The northside one should be starting the end of this year, so that will be a lot of public information. Building, there is more plan development, a lot of it around housing and parks. There is a lot of building and rebuilding happening in the city. So everything around housing and development is the biggest. And then the Public Market will be opening. We’re keeping a close eye on the men’s shelter. The Office of the Independent Police Monitor, I am really working closely with that group to make sure that they remain strong and maybe get stronger and the community gets what it wants. That’s a lot of it.”
In terms of issues, the issue that is on everyone’s mind, from the federal level down to individual municipalities is the budget.
“Probably the biggest issue is the constraint on our budget,” Madison observed. “Even though the city has been building public housing pretty quickly the past couple of years, but the restraints on the shared revenue still makes the revenue not adequate enough. And then you couple that with the federal government where it seems their mission is to reek havoc on those who have the least. And so local municipalities have to figure out how to pick up the slack when our federal government sort of abandoned people who really need them to be working well for them and that partnership and collaboration with local municipalities. So where both the city and the county have budget deficits and then you have the federal government who again their mission seems to be reeking havoc on those who have the least, that is probably the biggest barrier to overcome. So the task is trying to be creative with what we have available to us.”
Second on the list is affordable housing.
“Construction costs are very much higher,” Madison said. “You have the impact of tariffs. So everything that will work in unison to make daily life more affordable for folks is really working in the opposite direction thanks to our leader-in-chief in the White House. The cost of housing is outstripping wages. The mayor just gave her budget directions to the department heads. And the finance committee was recently updated. And we are already seeing the cost of fuel cut away at our available dollars. It’s going to be a tough year going into next year’s budget. It’s making it more difficult even for veterans. We’re going to see some changes around even folks having BadgerCare, Medicaid. Seeing folks who are depending on BadgerCare pay for their healthcare, to see those requirements change for people to even feed themselves or get food for their families, how do local municipalities step in when our budget is not endless. There is only so much to go around.”
A big piece of the affordable housing issue, which impacts lower income and middle income families is the issue of homelessness.
“I would say the most pressing need, which we can all see is solutions to our challenges around homelessness,” Madison said. “Again, lots of folks who are struggling with homelessness are also dependent on dollars that come through the federal government. A lot of folks don’t realize that not all dollars spent on homelessness are local dollars. There are dollars coming from HUD, for example, that make their way down through the city and the county. And so when you see attacks on those dollars and those organizations, that trickles down to attacks on people locally. You also have a population of older folks becoming homeless, so that is also becoming a challenge. But the city is building more senior housing. For example, we just had Julian Walters at our last Common Council meeting. He talked about a development he is working on where it will build new senior affordable housing apartments. I would say homelessness is the top issue.”
And the main thing with homelessness is not just allowing people get off the street. It’s about finding long-term solutions so that the individuals experiencing homelessness are empowered to stayed permanently housed.
“On the one hand, the city in partnership with Dane County, is building the Bartillon Shelter that will house 250 men, which doesn’t meet our need,” Madison said. “That number came during COVID where the numbers were quite lower than we see now. But what I do want to acknowledge is the successes we are seeing with some of the men coming from the temporary shelter in my district to permanent housing. Porchlight has hired new
housing case managers whereas a couple of months ago, they were reporting maybe 8-11 people were moving from shelter to housing, it had doubled in one of the last reports to 16 moving from shelter to housing. And what I like about the Bartillon shelter, that model will be there helping people with a case worker, working on their stability on a regular basis to get people permanently housed. The point is not to have folks have to need the shelter eventually, but to be housed permanently.”
For a long time beginning with the COVID pandemic, people who were homeless camped out in city parks or would sleep in their cars parked in city parks parking lots. For Madison, this type of arrangement, even temporary, has some merit.
“I just saw that the county set aside around $2 million in their capital budget to purchase a campground where people could legally camp and park,” Madison said. “I don’t think they have released the request for proposals yet. But that $2 million is there to do so.”
And an other side of the housing issue is people using motels as their permanent housing, no matter how unstable the situation is.
“Some of the challenges that they face is that living in a motel is not like paying rent to a landlord,” Madison said. “You can’t stay in a motel because all of your dollars are going to pay for the motel rent. You may have folks who are living in a motel who are just stuck. They are trapped to a degree. I cannot identify a program. I’ve looked and searched, but there isn’t an adequate program right now that is 100 percent centered on families living in motels to be able to get out of the motels and get into permanent housing because the resources don’t seem to be there.”
And living in a motel can be especially detrimental to children in the long run because it eliminates and sense of stability and normal family life.
“My first year in office, probably the first six months, I had learned that there are 70 odd kids and the bulk of them were kids who were homeless in the motels coming from my district alone,” Madison said. “The kids could be homeless in a motel, but going to schools across the city. But somewhere around 70 kids were living up there in a motel at one point.”
For many decades, the city was the center of affordable and subsidized housing. It was hit with a NIMBY attitude on the part of other municipalities in Dane County. Dane County is tryhing to change “The other challenge that I have been talking about a bit more lately is the lack of a regional coordination around homelessness,” Madison said. “Again, if you become homeless outside of Madison, you pretty much have to come in to Madison because there aren’t resources in other areas with the exception of Sun Prairie, which has the Sunshine Place, but that is not a shelter. So imagine if each part of the county had at minimum even a 20 bed shelter where you come in, get your bearings and get some resources and get connected. Not only will it relieve the pressure, but it will relieve the pressure on the individual and the family that becomes homeless because they don’t have the stressor on figuring out how to manage your child is going to school closer to where you lived at, but now you have to come in and live in a shelter in Madison and get you kids back and forth. It’s a burden.”
Dane County is trying to do something about it.
“I do like what the county is doing,” Madison said. “I learned that the county was intentionally trying to invest in more affordable housing outside of the city, in other parts of the county. I like that because when people become homeless in Fitchburg or Sun Prairie or Middleton or Verona — I get phone calls all the time — they are forced to have to figure out how to come into Madison.”