The Milwaukee Public Museum has now packed 600,000 items from its collection of 4 million as the staff prepares to move them into their new home: The Nature & Culture Museum of Wisconsin at 1310 N. 6th St.

The staff could still be working through 2027 to move the remaining items, said Collections Move Project Manager Sara Podejko on June 24.

“We will continue packing here even after the future museum opens,” Podejko said.

According to the museum’s June report to the County Board’s committee on parks and culture, construction continues to move along on track, and the new site is expected to open mid-way through 2027.

About half of the total collection has already been inventoried, a painstaking process that has given the museum the opportunity to streamline its electronic storage system.

“There’s been a lot of work ongoing in the collections departments prior to digitize their material, but not everything was. And so, a real upside to this move is that we are able to not only inventory, but barcode all of our specimens,” Podejko said.

That barcode allows collection move technicians to easily input items into an inventory spreadsheet and immediately relocate them.

“It kind of eliminates some human error, which is really important when you’re dealing with four million things,” Podejko said.

Twenty-nine staff members are facilitating the move, including the technicians who were hired and trained specifically to move the artifacts.

Posted June 25, 2026 6:13am CDT

Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett’s former top deputy in city government is now working at an engineering firm run by major Hogsett donors that has received contracts worth up to $62 million since the mayor took office.

The top Hogsett official, former chief of staff Dan Parker, signed many of those contracts himself while he led the Department of Public Works from 2017 to 2022.

Parker’s move to American Structurepoint, about a month after leaving his job as Hogsett’s No. 2 at the end of 2025, comes as one of the company’s contracts with the city is facing scrutiny for being too expensive.

An analysis by IndyStar and Mirror Indy found the Indianapolis-based firm’s tens of millions of dollars worth of deals make it one of the largest city contractors over the past decade.

Meanwhile, the company’s political action committee and two of its executives, President Cash Canfield and Senior Executive Vice President Greg Henneke, are major donors to Hogsett. Collectively since 2014, about $368,000 in campaign donations have come from those executives, one of their spouses and a political action committee run by Structurepoint.

Multiple ethics experts said Parker’s move to Structurepoint raises questions about potential conflicts of interest.

Jeff Hauser, founder of the national ethics watchdog group the Revolving Door Project, said it’s “definitely concerning” that Parker began working for a top city contractor and major donors to the mayor shortly after leaving his high-profile role as a public servant.

“There is a concern about how he might have been behaving in anticipation of leaving government service,” Hauser said. He compared it to dating: “If you are planning to ask somebody out in the future, that could impact your behavior before you actually ask them out.”

It’s unclear whether Parker is working on city-related matters for Structurepoint. Neither the company, nor Parker, responded to repeated emails, calls and questions sent by IndyStar/Mirror Indy. Parker said “no comment” twice when approached by a reporter at an Indy Chamber event on June 23 before walking away.

A new IndyStar/Mirror Indy investigation has also raised ethical questions surrounding Parker’s role in how city contracts were awarded. The reporting found Hogsett’s campaign fundraiser arranged for donors’ project wish lists to be hand-delivered to Parker when he led DPW. Within months, some of the firms received contracts included on the wish lists. The deals, approved by the city’s Board of Public Works, were signed by Parker.

If Parker’s working on city contracts at Structurepoint, his public-sector experience could give the company an unfair advantage, said Danielle Caputo, senior legal counsel for ethics at the Washington, D.C.-based Campaign Legal Center.

Because Parker — a longtime Hogsett ally and former Indiana Democratic Party chairman — understands the inner workings of the Hogsett administration, he could know how to appeal to decision-makers with whom he recently had close professional relationships, Caputo said. In at least one major city, San Francisco, even communication between the city and Parker at this juncture would be forbidden to prevent favoritism.

“You don’t want a contract to be accepted just because the deputy mayor … is best friends or was close work confidants with the person who’s now choosing where the contract goes,” Caputo said. “That’s not how the government works and that’s not what’s in the best interest of the public.”

City lacks some revolving door guardrails

It’s not uncommon for elected officials and past government employees to accept lucrative roles in the private sector, experts noted. But many experts recommend cooling-off periods that prohibit former public officials and employees from quickly cashing in on their experience in private-sector roles with government contractors.

The city’s ethics code doesn’t require employees to wait to take a job with companies they oversaw or awarded contracts to while in their government role, despite Hogsett campaigning on such an idea in 2015 during his first mayoral bid.

The city’s rules do, however, prevent former employees from working on “particular matters” such as public works projects, economic development deals and other transactions in which they were “personally and substantially” involved.

But city attorneys can waive these ethics restrictions for past employees if their involvement is found not to be “adverse” to the city.

Hogsett spokesperson Aliya Wishner said Parker has not received a waiver, but she didn’t answer several questions about the situation, including when Parker informed the mayor he was applying for a job at Structurepoint and whether he was then shielded from decisions involving the firm. She also did not say whether he’d sought a waiver.

“The city does not control where city employees go after they leave the enterprise and cannot prohibit people from working where they want,” Wishner said in a written statement. “Nothing in the ethics ordinance prohibits former employees generally from earning a living in the private sector following their employment with the city-county, with the exception of activities to lobby the city-county for a period of one year.”

State law is more restrictive than the city’s ordinance. It requires a one-year cooling-off period before state employees can work for or lobby a company if they negotiated or held an administrative role over a contract involving that company while the employee worked for the state. That restriction applies to former state employees, officers and special state appointees, who may seek a waiver from the state ethics commission.

Hauser said the goal of such ethics rules isn’t to stop people from making a living in the private sector. It’s about protecting taxpayers.

“There are many construction and engineering jobs in the world that are not connected to government service,” Hauser said. “The question is whether this person should be involved in a firm that is so focused on public contracting.”

It’s not the first time former Hogsett administration workers have quickly gone on to work for city contractors.

IndyStar and Mirror Indy previously reported that Hogsett’s first chief of staff, Thomas Cook, did not seek a waiver after leaving the city in 2020. He went to work for a Hogsett-connected law firm, Bose McKinney & Evans, where he helped the firm’s developer clients secure millions of dollars worth of city incentives.

Past reporting from the news outlets also showed attorneys for Hogsett went on to work for law firms that do business with the city, where they then performed similar work under contract. The city previously said, in those cases, that the attorneys were either granted waivers or that the legal work they did after they left city employment was different enough as to not trigger the ethics ordinance.

‘Astronomical’

Parker’s move to the company comes as one of the city’s contracts with Structurepoint has drawn scrutiny.

The broad contract for stormwater consulting services will pay American Structurepoint up to $14.1 million over nearly four years, with most contractors earning hourly wages in the $100 to $300 range.

The latest amendment to the Structurepoint contract was signed in late 2025 when Parker was Hogsett’s chief of staff, roughly a month before he started working for Structurepoint. It’s unclear what, if any, role he played in its negotiation.

For consulting services, DPW puts out a “request for qualifications” to firms in the industry, according to the agency. Department leaders choose a company based on a variety of factors. Then those contracts must be approved by the Board of Public Works, an entity made up of City-County Council and mayoral appointees, and signed by the DPW director.

The contract’s price tag caught the attention of Susie Cordi, a Board of Public Works member who has previously campaigned for Hogsett.

Cordi called the cost “astronomical” in a November 2025 meeting where she urged DPW leaders to fill vacant positions. She lamented that the city was paying higher hourly rates to private contractors instead of more cost-effective wages to DPW employees.

The city defended the contract. Current DPW Director Todd Wilson, who worked for American Structurepoint from 2007 to 2013, told IndyStar/Mirror Indy that the city lacks staffers to perform all the needed work.

Specialized employees like engineers can earn higher salaries in the private sector. He said DPW is working to boost recruiting and increase city salaries to better compete and rely less on contractors going forward.

“But I don’t see in any world where we would completely eliminate staff augmentation from our program,” Wilson said.

DPW spokesperson Kyle Bloyd said the agency’s extensive contracts with Structurepoint and other companies are crucial to the timely execution of DPW’s five-year infrastructure improvement plan worth about $1 billion.

Still, Cordi called the contracts “money in Structurepoint’s pocket” in an IndyStar/Mirror Indy interview.

“We’re understaffed,” she said, “and now Structurepoint is reaping all these benefits from us not being able to keep our engineers.”

Mirror Indy reporter Peter Blanchard and IndyStar reporter Hayleigh Colombo contributed reporting.

Mirror Indy, a nonprofit newsroom, is funded through grants and donations from individuals, foundations and organizations. Sign up for our free newsletters.

Contact IndyStar Indianapolis City Hall Reporter Jordan Smith at jtsmith@indystar.com. Follow him on X @jordantsmith09.

Emily Hopkins is a senior reporter at Mirror Indy. You can reach them by phone or Signal at 317-790-5268 or email at emily.hopkins@mirrorindy.org. Follow them on most social media @indyemapolis or on Bluesky @emilyhopkins.bsky.social.

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