Wisconsin Counties Feud Over Unwanted Sex Offender

Local officials in Fond du Lac and Milwaukee counties are feuding over where to house a released sex offender.

State law requires sex offenders to be released to the county where they committed the crime. For 51-year-old Clint Rhymes that’s Milwaukee. But local ordinances there make that impossible. The plan now is to release him to a house in Fond du Lac County. Fond du Lac District Attorney Eric Toney said that would set a bad precedent.

“Nobody wants one of these sex offenders to be their next-door neighborhood,” Toney said. “Each community has a responsibility to address these issues and not pass it off on another county. And what we don’t want to become in Fond du Lac County is a dumping ground and turn into a Guantanamo Bay for sex offenders.”

MIlwaukee Alderman Tony Zielinski said he’s working on a plan to change local ordinances and establish rural or industrial locations in the county where sex offenders can be housed far from residential areas.

“And when I say rural I mean, I’m saying, I’m thinking like some farm where there aren’t any other houses around for a half a mile or a mile or something like that,” Zielinski said.

A court hearing in Milwaukee scheduled for Dec. 16 could resolve the feud between the two counties. Milwaukee County Judge William Brash is expected to make a final decision on which county Clint Rhymes will be released to. But before then Fond du Lac County Sheriff Mick Fink is urging residents in the town of Eldorado where Rhymes may end up living to weigh in with their concerns.

He’s scheduled a community meeting there for next Monday night.

“My point to the community out there will be, ‘You folks need to get in touch with the judge presiding in this case or let’s get some good discussion going on a state wide level with the legislators,’” Fink said.

He said Fon du Lac County is willing to accept its own sex offenders but it’s unfair for Milwaukee to try to ship its offenders up north because they don’t want them in their backyard.

Meanwhile Republican state Rep. Joel Kleefisch of Oconomowoc is working on a bill that would establish statewide regulations for housing released sex offenders. Such a law would pre-empt the increasing number of local ordinances restricting where sex offenders can live.

Kleefisch said he may launch a legislative council study committee this summer to come up with the best approach to crafting such a law.

“It’s going to be a uniform law across the state and the last thing we want to do is do that wrong,” Kleefisch said. “We want to do it right the first time.”

He added that he wants a law that keeps people safe from sex offenders and allows the state Department of Corrections to keep any eye on them.

Clint Rhymes has spent the last decade fighting a court battle to win release from the Sand Ridge Secure Treatment Center for violent sex offenders. Before that he spent 17 years in prison for a violent rape and attempted murder he committed in 1988. His release has been approved by a Milwaukee County judge.