Meeting to order.

I am Alderwoman Chairwoman Melele A.

Cox.

We are joined to my right by Vice Chair Alderman Lamont Westmoreland to his right.

We are joined by Alderman Robert Ballman.

To his right, we are joined by DPW infrastructure to my left.

We are joined by staff assistant Carmen Roman.

To her left, we are joined by Alderman Alex Brower to his left.

We are joined by Alder Woman Larisa Taylor.

Before we begin, I just do want to announce that for item number five.

But we do have e-comments that were open and do have public uh uh comment on them on legislature for all members and for department who may want to ask some of those questions for the public or just be aware of what those questions and comments were.

Go ahead.

Audder woman Tyler.

Before we actually start, can we just say um thank you to individuals who wore denim today because today is denim day?

And I just like to say that we appreciate everyone who is um standing with victims uh or survivors, I'm sorry, of sexual assault uh by wearing denim.

So thank you so much for that.

Oh yeah.

Um yes, recognition of denim day today uh for all those who are wearing denim.

Thank you for your participation.

Alder Woman, I'm Alderman Brouwer.

Yeah, thank you so much.

Um on the agenda, if I may.

Um, I got a request from Alder Woman Moore to um if this committee would so allow to move item 19 um to after item number five to make it new item six.

Um Alderman Moore asked me that this morning.

Um I'd like to do you want me to make a motion or what's the best route?

At the appropriate time.

Okay, thank you.

When will that be?

Um after item five.

Okay.

Thank you.

Uh item number one, file number two, five two one eight two resolution relating to approving the levying of assessments and construction of accessible public improvement projects at various locations and appropriating funds for these purposes.

Good morning.

Holly Rutten back with DPW.

I will be advising on the special assessment process and the project details.

For those projects approved this morning, a bill will be sent to each property owner sometime after completion of the work.

Within 45 days upon receipt of the bill, the full amount may be paid without interest.

If the bill is not paid within the 45-day grace period, a charge of 8.5% simple interest per year will be added.

If the assessment is at least 125 dollars, the assessment can be paid over a period of 10 years on the tax roll at the 8.5% interest.

For those projects approved with late billing, a bill will not be sent before January 1st, 2028.

In relation to this public hearing, an official notice was sent to all impacted property owners.

And we will go in the order that is listed on the official notice.

In the first Aldermanic district, North 37th Street from West Hampton Avenue to West Stark Street, install traffic calming speed humps.

Is anyone here to provide testimony on this item?

Out of 23 impacted property owners, two were in support and two were opposed.

The alderman's with alder woman supports the project.

The motion by Alderman Ballman is for approval.

Are there any objections to that motion?

Hearing none, so ordered.

And before we go to the next one, if anyone, if you could please silence your cell phones for the duration of the meeting, that would be great.

Uh thank you.

Go ahead, Holly.

North 46th Street from West Hampton Avenue to West Stark Street, install traffic calming speed humps.

Is anyone here to provide testimony on this item?

Be it's on the results of the postcard survey.

The Alder Woman supports the project.

The motion by Alderman Ballman is for approval.

Uh hearing no objections, so ordered.

In the third Aldermanic district, East Kane, please, between North Warren Avenue to North Pulaski Street, install traffic calming speed humps.

Is anyone here to provide testimony on that item?

I'll be brief.

And I think that it's important to uh install these humps, not just for the current issue, but as uh the attention is given to Brady uh with the Brady Street bid and traffic calming measures there, it's just gonna force more traffic onto Kane, which is viewed by a lot of drivers as kind of a shortcut um to avoid North Avenue and and Brady.

So I think it's very important that we calm the existing speed um now and in the future with future projects.

I'd just like to specifically call out Brett for who's here.

You can wait for collecting signatures and uh Alderman Brouwer for his attention to third district uh and protecting the the residents of third district uh alderman Brouwer very much appreciate uh your hard work.

Thank you.

Are there any questions for this resident?

Uh hearing on this in the third district.

Alderman Brouwer, did you want to say?

Yeah, thank you both.

Thank you all so much.

Came out from East Kane and for residents who've reached out.

Um, let's get this traffic calming going.

I I have been asked by constituents all over the district for traffic calming, and I'd really appreciate the work, um, especially the work that you put in Brett to get the signatures um to get this happening.

So I would encourage every resident of the third district that wants to see this to get the community-led traffic calming packet from our office, move forward and get some of these things going.

Do you need a motion, Madam Chair?

Yes.

I move to approve.

The motion for Automan Brower is for approval.

Are there any objections to that motion?

Hearing none, so ordered.

In the fifth Aldermanic district, North 81st Street from West Capitol Drive to West February Avenue, install traffic calming speed humps.

Is anyone here to provide testimony on this item?

Approval.

The motion by Alderman Westmoreland is for approval.

Are there any objections to that motion?

Hearing none, so ordered.

In the 7th Aldermanic District, North 57th Street from West Vienna Avenue to West Melminas Street, install traffic calming speed humps.

Is anyone here to provide testimony on this item?

Out of 29 impacted properties, four were in favor and two were opposed.

The alderman supports the project.

The motion by Alderman Brouwer is for approval.

Are there any objections to that motion?

Hearing none, so ordered.

In the 12th Aldermanic district, South Ninth Street from West Maple Street to West Mitchell Street, install traffic calming speed humps.

Is anyone here to provide testimony on this item?

Based on the results of the Aldermanic survey, the Alderman is in support.

Uh Audible Woman Tyler will move approval, hearing no objections, so ordered West Maple Street from South Ninth Street to South 10th Street, install traffic calming speed humps.

Is anyone here to provide testimony on this item?

Based on the results of the Aldermanic survey, the Alderman supports the project.

Alderman Bomberman would move approval, hearing no objection, so ordered.

In the 13th Aldermanic District, South First Street from West Armor Avenue to West Van Norman Avenue, install traffic calming speed humps.

Is anyone here to provide testimony on this item?

I believe the Alderman is on the big board.

Uh nothing, Ted.

All right.

Umderman Westmoreland will move approval.

Hearing objections, so order.

In the 14th Aldermanic District, South 7th Street from West Euclid Avenue to West Oklahoma Avenue, install traffic calming speed humps.

Is anyone here to provide testimony on this item?

Come forward, please.

Based on the results of oh, I can still read the results.

Based on the results of the Aldermanic survey, the majority were in support, so the Alder Woman supports the project.

Please give us your name and address.

Thank you.

My name is Abby Gopez.

Please flip the microphone.

My name is Sabigo Perez.

Uh I'm on the South 7th Street.

We still have racing going down through there.

Um speeding because they're cutting off the expressway to try to skip the light on Oklahoma.

And it's just a continuous race every day.

So we would appreciate a speed hump there.

Thank you.

Any questions for this resident from committee?

Um hearing none.

Hearing no objections, so order.

In the 14th Aldermanic district, South 7th Street from West Ohio Avenue to West Euclid Avenue, install traffic calming speed humps.

Is anyone here to provide testimony on this item?

Based on the results of the postcard survey, the majority were in favor and the Alder Woman supports.

So order.

Alderman Obama will move adoption of the entire file.

Hearing no objections, so order.

Item number two, file number two five two one eight three resolution determining it necessary to make various accessible public improvements at various locations and appropriating funds for these purposes with the city engineering costs estimated to be 40,000 for a total estimated cost of these projects being uh 1,260,000.

Good morning, Holly Rutten back with DPW.

This is for setting up design funding for future accessible projects.

Any questions from committee hearing none, Otterman Westmoreland will move adoption.

Hearing no objections to order item number three, file number two five two one eight four resolution determining and necessary to make various non-accessible public improvements at various locations and appropriating funds for these purposes.

With the city engineering costs estimated to be 27,000 for a total estimated cost of these projects being 254,000.

Good morning.

This is for setting up engineering on future non-accessible projects.

Are there any questions from committee?

Hearing none.

Audible woman Taylor would move adoption.

Hearing no objections to order item number four.

File number two five two one eight five resolution approving construction of non-accessible public improvements at various locations and appropriating funds for these purposes with the city construction costs estimated to be uh five five million eight hundred and seventy-nine thousand nine hundred and fifty-one dollars and fifty-three cents for a total estimated cost of these projects being fifty-two million four hundred and thirty-eight thousand seven hundred and thirty-three um dollars and forty-five cents.

Good morning.

This is setting up construction funding for non-assessable projects.

So order item number five.

File number two five two two one zero.

Communication from the Department of Public Works and Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewage District relating to the causes of and responses to flooding incidents.

This uh file is sponsored by Audit Woman Pratt, Otterman uh Chambers, Audrey Woman Cogs, Audar Woman Moore, Auderman Stamper, and Audar Woman, uh Dmitri Avich.

Um Pratt, did you want to speak to the file?

Yes.

Um given the recent flooding, uh uh my district was heavily affected as well as a lot of places throughout the city and the state as we know.

Um I brought this file forward so we could address a lot of the questions that I'm getting from constituents, um, and so we can talk about what we have done so far, and really to address what we plan on doing going forward uh to help change the situation and the ways that we can.

I understand that these are hundred-year floods that we we keep hearing about, even though they're happening every year.

Um but we uh we do have some responsibility or something we can do to help mitigate that and what are we doing to that end.

Um, and and that's why I brought this file forward to see what what we could do going forward.

Good morning, madam chair, committee members, um other elders here.

Uh, commissioner of public works.

Um what I'd like to do is I'm gonna give some details about the storm that week.

We're gonna go from 413 through 417.

Um, and then what will happen is that I'll hand it over to Kevin and Kurt.

We'll go through some of the things that sewers has done in the past, what they're doing in the future, and some of the response related to just sewers itself.

And then I'm gonna pivot over to Kevin Schaefer to get from a regional perspective from MSD, and at the end, and I will explain some operational changes as we kind of move forward from DPW ops.

So just kind of the sequence of events.

So the details of the storm Monday night was 413.

We had extreme high winds, moderate rain um impacts really were to more of a DPW forestry cruise with about 208 service calls.

Um, more than 30, 40 trees were roughly down.

Um that transitioned into Tuesday night, where it was the first time we see uh we've seen high rains, which should over three and a half inches on the north side of our city, um, and it came down extreme intensity, so about a 25-year flood kind of range that the word short the gauges were set.

At that time, we had about 402 sewer calls for surface flooding, uh an additional 64 forestry calls because the ground was still saturated, so we still had more impacts to our uh urban canopy.

And then we go into Wednesday night, so Wednesday night 415.

This is already when we already had two days of rain and high winds.

Uh we had 100% saturated soils in the city.

Um at this point, this is where the system was stressed, and and both uh our stewards section MSD can explain what that actually means.

It comes into more of a capacity issue within the system, the entire region.

Um, and that night we had 1,312 sewer calls that included surface flooding, backwaters, missing lids.

Um, there was huge pressure within the system itself that we're actually popping off manhole covers.

Uh and then we had additional 22 forestry calls.

Um and then we moved into Friday night, which we had intense rain minimal calls.

Um there were some surface flooding, but not as much as there was on the Tuesday Wednesday night.

So overall, the storm total for that week, we had about 1,714 sewer calls, 321 forestry calls, and numerous street maintenance calls because we had paving that was basically rupturing between the concrete base and asphalt surface.

Um just to put this in perspective.

We had seven inches of rain in five days.

Um as of April 18th, we had over nine inches of rain uh in the city of Milwaukee.

And to put that in perspective, the previous record was 7.38 for the entire month.

And as today we're sitting here, the month is still not over, and we're continuing to see rain.

So I just want to put that as history has gone through, as as Oliver and Pret has said, these floods and the intensity of rain is changing on a yearly basis.

What we've seen in August, what we've seen this week, even what we had seen a Monday and not high rains, but we have seen intense um winds coming across our city has been stressing not only DPW, but the whole entire region.

So at this point, I'm gonna hand over to Kevin and Kurt to explain the sewers itself.

A little bit about the difference between a combined sewer and what a separated sewer is because some of these are a little complex to explain, but it they're actually not they're simpler than they sound.

But Kevin.

So basically, where where we sit with events like this is that the impacts on different parts of the city differ quite a bit depending on what's going on.

So obviously, as the commissioner just noted, uh the rain gauges across the city showed different totals, different intensities depending on where you were.

The Tuesday night event was stronger on the north side.

Um the Wednesday night event had had larger surges downtown and on the south side.

So that impacts uh what happens and what the public sees.

Um we also have very different topography depending on where you are in the city, different subwatersheds, different basins, um, different things going on.

Um and so I know from some folks there was uh and and in the file are some intersections related to surface flooding and maybe some things around uh the capacity of an inlet or a catch basin to take on water and the speed at which it can, as well as um things that might have been blocking that that inlet and catch or catch basin depending on the specific situation.

Um and then I had some conversations with alders and members of the public over the past couple days that were more about what we call backwaters or um uh where there's water or some type of or the liquid coming up through the sewer drains in the basement and backing up from the sewer system into the basement.

And so um just want to acknowledge that there's kind of a wide variety of challenges we've heard, and that those challenges seem to be different depending on the specific local context of what's going on.

Um so as the commissioner uh alluded to we have uh portions of the city that are in what's called the combined sewer area, where there is one sewer network that is uh uh taking both uh your your sewage and your storm water into one system and shipping it to the Metropolitan Interceptor sewers managed by MSD and Kevin Schaefer will uh has generously joined us and and we'll be talking about that more.

Um I'm gonna just try to verbally generalize where that is.

So the combined sewer system is closer to the lakefront, closer into downtown.

Um on the north portion of the city, it actually extends into shorewood, so along the lakefront it goes into shorewood.

Um but otherwise you can think of the boundary as as south of Capitol, as you head west on Capitol, roughly around 20th or so.

It starts heading southwest.

Um, so it is just south of the Century City uh development that the city's been working so hard on for a while.

Um it uh ends up extending partway into the Sherman Park neighborhood, east of Sherman Boulevard for the most part, um, but just east of it.

Um it uh then heads south.

There is a portion of Washington Heights.

Washington Heights is the furthest western portion of the combined sewer area, so about half of Washington Heights is in it.

You continue heading south, kind of straight over the valley, roughly along along 35th Street, and then it starts bending down uh towards Forest Home and then Oklahoma on the south side.

So if you're inside those boundaries, if you can think of your mental map, uh that's the combined sewer area.

Outside of that, largely we are in a separated sewer system in a separated sewer system.

Uh the uh uh rainwater storm water is being managed separately from the sewage and waste coming from homes and businesses.

Um they go into two separate systems.

Um the sewage and waste still reaches the MMSD system and goes to be treated at either the South Shore plant or the um the Jones Island plant.

Um and the storm uh water in that area largely doesn't touch the system before it gets from our storm system to a river or a creek or some type of surface water.

So that's uh one of the one of the key differences.

Um generally speaking, the combined sewer service area is designed and has historically been designed for a 10-year frequency storm.

Um and historically, the separated system, the stormwater system in the separated area historically was designed to a five-year storm.

Um we are actually five or ten years ago now.

We decided to start with all of the replacement and relay projects we do in the separated area to also design to a 10-year storm in that area as well.

So that's that's kind of a rough overview.

But we've just for the benefit of the public, and I think most of you at the table know this, we've not just been sitting around waiting for events to get larger and larger.

Obviously, the deep tunnel is is you know was the most significant initial investment in managing large rain events uh in the city's history.

But that type of work has continued to happen, and MMSD really has been leading the way on this, and the city's been partners with them and working with them as they make investments in the watersheds across uh the metro area.

So you know, right now there's been significant investments happening along the KK River to manage um flood waters and and storm events in that area.

Um still ongoing, but historically the Menominee River saw a significant number of investments.

Um Lincoln Creek was one of the first uh to see um those types of investments where we reinvested in both habitat and flood management in restoring one of our waterways in in the metro area.

Um on the city's end of things, um, we've continued to look for opportunities to do more stormwater management.

Um we've got relatively aggressive requirements for private property owners uh uh for stormwater management on site.

Um we also have been investing, as many of you know, in green infrastructure for a while, and we've accelerated that over the past three to four years at the direction of the mayor, in fact.

Um, and then uh we also uh relatively recently within the past decade did invest in a large stormwater facility in Danin Park.

Um it's not our only large stormwater facility, but that was a recent one that we did uh that was a change as well.

We have upcoming work um in and around um Century City and uh Roosevelt uh area to take advantage of MMSD's future West Basin project to try to reduce flooding in in those portions of town as well.

So this is a thing that we're continuing to invest in.

We expect to continue to invest in.

Obviously, with climate change, we know that our largest uh impact, at least that we see in infrastructure, and I think that the public's been seeing so far locally has been the increase in large events like this.

Um, and I appreciate the the comment uh from the sponsor, the lead sponsor on you know, we keep hearing hundred-year events year after year.

Um, you know, we recognize that too uh within the industry and within DPW that these the events, the categories we use to determine what type of event and intensity is occurring, are set uh uh at a federal level, and they look backwards, they use past data.

So, what is considered a hundred-year event does continue to um change over time as we get more and more data, but because it is looking backwards, it's still always gonna be a little bit behind what the frequencies uh you know may actually be due to due to climate change as that accelerates.

Um just to note a couple things.

So within uh the the city's management and this and in the sewers group, and Kurt here can add in a moment uh if he has anything to add.

Kurt, who oversees our environmental engineering group, including sewers underground operations.

Um that group oversees about 55,700 storm sewer structures that capture runoff uh across the city.

About 32,000 of those are inlets in the separated sewer system area, and about 24,000 are catch basins within the combined sewer area.

Um we do have regular cleaning of those structures.

It primarily occurs between April and November, um, not over winter.

Um, and that is that's part of our regular maintenance of of the city's sewer system uh across the city.

Um checking my notes here, is there anything else?

I think that primarily touches on on where we are with the infrastructure.

Um I think we'll get into more questions, but I do want to say, you know, going forward, we recognize between August and now uh a couple weeks ago that there's work to do to make more investments.

Um we're excited that MMSD and the county and the city are doing a joint task force to see what we can do to accelerate investments uh that are already in the pipeline and think about new and creative things we could we could do and and figure out what we can fund and move forward to to try to minimize this going forward.

Um there are operational pieces, which I know the commissioner will will touch on um when we get back to him, uh, but uh from an infrastructure perspective, this is really important work, but it also unfortunately does take time because it is large capital projects.

Um we're excited to work with MMSD to see what we can do to move faster on those large capital projects.

Anything uh thank you.

Uh so good morning committee and chairwoman.

Uh Kurt Spranger's engineer in charge of the environmental engineering section.

Uh really not a whole lot more to add.

Kevin covered it very well.

Uh maybe a few other stats.

We have roughly 2500 miles of sewer in the city uh split between the combined separated sewers, and as Kevin mentioned, the 50 uh some thousand uh catch facins and storm millets that we're responsible for cleaning.

Uh I would add we do focus our cleaning in the uh non-winter months, but we will certainly respond to requests for cleaning in our sewer system, both on the basins and the sewers themselves.

Uh we're also tasked with responding to backwater, so if a resident uh calls in, lets us know that there's a backwater present at their property.

We will you know respond to that.

Um, yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, I think that's probably about it from after everything you had.

Good morning.

My name is Kevin Schaefer.

I'm the executive director of Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewage District.

I have a short PowerPoint, which probably addresses a lot of what Kevin and others have said, but hopefully this helps uh with that same issue.

I guess I gotta do it this way.

So just to uh summarize MMSD, we cover 29 different municipalities in the Greater Milwaukee area.

We have 1.1 million people in that service area and around 423 square miles.

We convey, store, and treat uh wastewater, reclaim wastewater, and we also manage flooding, regional flooding in the area.

Uh Kevin went through the description of the combined sewer area.

It's basically that hatched area that you see on the map right there, that orange yellow hatch that you see there.

Um so it's it's the downtown area of uh the city and part of Shorewood as well.

Um we have around 300 miles of pipe that we own and operate, the regional sewers.

As you heard, the city has around 2500, and then there's uh individual pipes as well that are part of this.

We operate two water reclamation facilities plus the deep tunnel system.

So just can we see this?

Yeah, so just not working that well.

There's really three systems in the region that manage wastewater.

There's the pipe that goes from the business or house to the street, that's the private sewer system.

Uh, there's the uh the municipal system in this case the city, but all 29 municipalities have their own sewer systems that drained our system, and then we're a regional system.

So if you look at this map on the upper left, you'll see the the homes, a depiction of that, the pipes coming from those homes.

Uh, that's the private system.

Then you have the city sanitary sewer system.

That can either be the separate sewer or the combined sewer that you just heard about, which then drains to the deep tunnel or to the uh the treatment plants.

I have an animation, hopefully.

That will work here.

Frozen.

Okay, let's try this now.

So it starts raining.

You've heard about the gates on the tunnel.

I'll explain those a bit.

Um this is everyone's nightmare when it rains.

This animation is on our website as well, so if you want to look at it there, you can so what you'll see is when it's uh a normal day, water comes through the private system that I talked about into the village or city system that then takes it down to the regional system, which is that pipe there, takes it to a structure, and as you can see, the blue line on the bottom that's taking water to the treatment plants that's always flowing.

On the larger storms, we it it builds up in that chamber and we start spilling into the deep tunnel system at that point.

As the storm continues, the tunnel starts to fill up.

And what we do to try to prevent a basement backups because it has to go through the MMSD system, the village system or city system, and then the private system is we have some gates where we're redirecting water from the tunnel because the tunnel's full.

It can't hold any more water.

We redirect water from that tunnel to the waterways, and that's the overflows that you hear about in the news where we had 2.7 billion gallons last year, or last we announced last week as two weeks ago.

So that animation is on our website.

Hopefully that helps explain it a bit to how the system works.

But um just wanted to show that.

And I'm gonna go back a little earlier in April.

Uh we had three inches of rain hit the downtown area April 2nd through the 4th.

Um deep tunnel filled to 353 million gallons.

It holds 432 million gallons, so it was pretty full.

Uh, we did not have overflows that time period, but the gr the ground was saturated, as the commissioner said.

The ground was saturated, everything was wet.

And even if you go 10 days later, which is basically what it was, the ground was still pretty saturated.

We moved to the uh April 13th, 14th timeline.

We had a prolonged rainfall with four four inches of uh uh rain uh in the downtown area, it was over seven inches, which you heard the commissioner talk about.

We uh filled the tunnel to 398 million gallons out of 432, so the tunnel was full.

When you were that close, it's full.

Uh we did have a combined sewer overflow of 2.7 billion gallons and a separate sewer overflow of 12 million gallons.

Now the tunnel was not built for flood management, the tunnel was built for water quality.

It was built to protect the lake, protect our drinking water supply.

So we only have overflows when the tunnel fills.

And although we don't want an overflow, those overflows help prevent basement backups in a lot of areas.

So it's kind of a safety valve for the whole area.

So we need to have the overflows for these very large storms, so we do all we can to prevent them.

This just summarizes the uh the rain of that week.

The top graph that you see, those are hourly rainfall amounts.

So every time that bar is an hour.

And as you can see on the uh evening of the 14th, early 15th, we had a very large event hit the north shore, which the commissioner talked about.

We had uh overflow points not from the tunnel but up in the system that overflowed during that time period.

That's what you see with the uh 824 p.m.

start.

Those just automatically go if the water gets too deep, and we want those to go because if water gets too deep, it's gonna start backing up into basements.

So those try to help prevent that basement backup from occurring in those systems.

We had filled the tunnel to around 340 million gallons that night.

Uh as you can see, it pretty much stopped raining until the evening of the 15th.

And if you see that one blue bar at the top, we had a three-inch per hour rainfall hit, which is a very extreme event in a short period of time.

You also see that vertical blue line at the bottom.

So this bottom shows the cumulative rainfall.

Uh sorry to show, but right there.

Right in that area, you see the line goes straight up.

That's because the rain's coming in so fast that it's that's the gauge at Jones Island.

So we had held it to around 340, 350 during the day on the 15th, no overflows, and then on the uh evening of the 15th, we had this huge rainfall hit us again, which is when the three-inch hit, and that's when we had to close the tunnel off and have a tunnel combined sewer overflow.

We had the individual overflows up in the neighborhoods, uh Bayside and 32nd and Hampton, different areas, and then this was a tunnel event where we had to close the tunnel and redirect that water from the tunnel to the rivers because the tunnel was full.

Um the tunnel was full until we ended the CSO on April 19th.

So when the rainstorm hit on the 16th, Thursday, when it hit on the 17th, uh Friday, that water just passed through the system.

The tunnels full.

We're treating what we can at the treatment plants.

Anything over what we treat at the treatment plants goes to the rivers to try to prevent basement backups.

Hopefully that made sense.

This is the county's 211 calls uh center.

This is for the storm a couple of weeks ago, and what you can see on the red dots is the reported uh basement backups.

Now, where that water comes from, we don't exactly know from these call centers, but can it be water that comes through a uh uh floor drain, water that comes in through a window well?

We don't know from this data.

Um after the storm hit last August, that was a thousand year storm that was 15 inches of rain.

We had seven inches of rain two weeks ago.

Uh when that storm hit, um I asked the commission, and they have agreed that we need to accelerate our flood management program.

So the projects that you see here here are on an accelerated timeline.

They were going to be done six, seven years from now.

Jack uh 35th Street Basin, uh Kevin mentioned this one.

This is 30 million gallons of storage that'll be at 35th in Capitol.

That one goes out for construction at the end of this year.

It'll be under active construction next year and probably some of the year after.

So that one's been accelerated.

Jackson Park is a great partnership with Milwaukee County.

This is the Jackson Park flood management project.

We're going to recarve that um that basin so that it will store water plus be erectional recreational amenity to the region.

That one should go out for bid a year from now.

So we're pushing that one forward as well.

And these are like 40 to 50 million dollars each projects.

These are not cheap.

We also have Wilson Park, which we now have an agreement with the county as of uh December, where they're going to allow us to do the same thing with Wilson Park, and we'll start the preliminary engineering design and get into construction.

That's probably more like a 2030, 2031 timeline to start, just to guess right now.

And then the Al Roe Steel Basin, which is 69 million gallons.

This is a great partnership with the city.

Uh we built the basin.

We need to connect the basin to the waterway, and the city is helping us go through some of the uh the mapping issues to get to that point.

So that one should come online relatively soon.

So we're accelerating our flood management program.

If people ask why we're doing flood management, if water comes out of the creek, it gets into the basement, it gets into the floor drain, which overloads the system.

So that's why you have flood management as part of this overall system.

We've got great great partnerships throughout the communities, but 15 inches of rain, seven inches of rain, there's no system in the country that can handle that much rainfall.

Yeah.

And so I mean a little response and operational changes as we kind of move forward.

So as part of the response, um, we had street maintenance crews and operations, DPW crews assist sewers.

It's very similar.

We we pivot all the time.

So if we go with snow and ice, we'll have those crews that will help with snow and ice.

If we go into flood mitigation, we were doing that as well.

Um, just like coming up in a future item, we'll talk about potholes and how we're pulling all our resources from somewhere else as well.

So it's not like our folks are just pigeonholed into one duty because it is it's always moving.

Um so some of the operational changes we're gonna start moving to the future is is over a number of years, there's been constant change in the way we park our vehicles, and so we get into exception parking.

Um, and exception parking is not bad, it's not a dirty word by any means.

It's just the needs of our citizens to allow double-sided parking on a roadway.

And so, what that does is that affects DPW's operations and how the city originally operated and collected leaves and street sweep or swept, etc.

So, as we kind of move forward, what we're going to do is we're gonna put up permanent, basically signage in our exception street areas and have guaranteed sweeping days.

Um so that means we can access those parking lanes where you'll have residual debris that happens there on a constant basis, rubble, um other things that are there.

Um it's something we we piloted last year in all the Romans district, but to do permanent signing, the con to this is we are gonna end up towing a lot of vehicles to access those.

Um but the signs will be permanent, they're not gonna be temporary, it's gonna be like the third Tuesday.

And the goal is to do a street sweeping from May 1st all the way to November 1st.

So it's six months out of the year.

And why we can only go that way is because when we get into November, all the way through, it gets into the winter months, temperatures get colder.

So that's one thing we're gonna start building.

It's not gonna be instantaneous.

We have to put the signs up, we have to build um the program's already getting built in the backside.

Um, so it'll take us a while to get to all the exception streets, which is about 25 to 30 percent of the city now.

And every day you'll see it in public safety, there's more and more streets that are coming this direction.

So that's one thing.

The other thing is how we actually collect leaves.

Because we have exception parking and in the city, and we have residual leaves, we have Mother Nature that is constantly affecting the way we do things, is we want to move to a full bagging operation.

So that means not pushing leaves into the parking lane, not parking on top of them.

But if we can't get to, let's say a snowstorm happened like we did right about Thanksgiving time, the bags will be sitting there on the side where we can collect them uh at a later date.

I I do want to put some things forward related to leaf collection.

Um, what we did is we got a shortened leaf collection last year, so right after Thanksgiving that Friday, we got uh a significant snowstorm, which buried a lot of the leaves that we were collecting.

We've been fortunate in previous years where we could go all the way until mid-December collecting.

That was not the case last year.

So we told residents to continue to put in those requests, which we did.

There were 4,029 requests over a period of time from December all the way to April, which we satisfied.

Additionally, we put out a spring uh leaf push-out, which we accomplished by the end of March.

And so, just to put some numbers into context, we collected 13,569 tons of leaves between 25 and 26, which is about 1,500 more than we did in the previous year.

So it we we collected more leaves, which is a fascinating number because you wouldn't think of that as we went through.

Now, there could be some numbers that change just based on how the wet there, but we weigh every leaf collection around the year.

So as we kind of move forward, um, our folks never stopped working.

So when they weren't doing snow and ice, they were doing leaf collection.

Now, the areas majority when we look at the fourth district or the third district, parts of the sixth and eighth and twelfth when there's exception parking, we couldn't access those leaves.

And that did occur.

So we have to pivot.

You know, the city doesn't operate, so to go to bag collection is going to stop a lot of different people raking in there.

There's gonna be a lot of communication moving forward to let our residents know there is a change.

Um, and it's not going to be easy because it depends if you know we're gonna put on social media, we'll be in news.

However, we can get it out to our residents because they're just familiar with doing things the same way.

And the more we get back to doing this, this is you know, there's a lot of comments, and I I had some conversations with Otter and Pratt, and a lot of our constituents ask us and residents, hey, why don't you do things like your neighboring communities do?

Well, this is one way.

I mean, a lot of them do this.

We're not the only city that does this.

Um we've been trying to poke around all over the nation.

What's the most effective way and to keep debris out of our basically our catch basins and our sewer system?

So these are the two things we're gonna work on this year to change.

Um, I'd like to start the communication now.

We're talking about April because when leaves start dropping in October, at least the public will know.

Um so I just I I was a little put off just by the failure because our staff has been working around the clock 12 hour days nonstop basically since October.

And we have moved into snow season, which is a standard in the city.

We get snow and ice, we're constantly in two GICs.

They were doing leaf collection, they're doing forestry calls.

Right now, I got forestry crews that are working 14 hour days just because of the storms we had on one day.

But as our city continues to change and the way we operate or the way we are building our infrastructure, we have to pivot our operations.

So these are the two things that we are going to move forward with moving to fall this year and starting the summer with a full street sweeping.

So just want to mention that.

So at this time I we're open to any questions.

That have been, I'm sure as their own homes are probably flooded, um, working hard to um help um other residents um clear out um their neighborhoods, their their homes, that kind of thing.

Um so I do want to um kind of lay that foundation.

I know a lot of criticism often comes um when we all are struggling with um what has happened, but what shouldn't be lost in that is the tremendous work um of so many folks to at least try to help.

Um so I want to say that first.

Um secondarily, um you gave the two things that you all plan to do immediately to help address the issue.

Um what is the price tag attached to those two things?

So from an operational standpoint for us, it's just bagging isn't going to change much.

Um it's just how we collect, so more of it's it's sitting in the operational background, so that one's not gonna be that much.

I mean, the one impact it will be to residents is actually purchasing these bags.

So that's that's the one concern.

I've had some conversations with others because not everyone can, I mean, they're minimal, they're two dollars a bag, but there is an impact to some of our you know more impoverished neighborhoods, and so that's recognizable.

So there might be other ways that as a city we can help subsidize at least getting those folks bags.

So that would be kind of like a financial impact there.

We move into the to the street sweeping, we have to move the operation there, and really it's the sign investment.

So it's putting in the permanent infrastructure to add the signs.

So it's gonna take us a while, and we'll go neighborhood by neighborhood trying to develop this, and obviously uh it's gonna be a lot in the fourth, sixth, third, and twelfth and parts of the eighth, and there's other areas even outside those districts that will be there.

So there, I don't have a fiscal note tied to that, but it's it's just gonna take us time to internally make all the signs and get those up.

And we've already had discussions to start already, and so we'll start targeting neighborhoods and installing signs.

And then once we have the signs installed, that's when that street sweeping will transition.

I'm assuming it's it's we're not gonna have all the signage up by the end of this year, but we will have a good portion of it, and so this might take a year, too, maybe a year to three years, depending on how long this takes us to get signage up.

So it's a process, it's not instantaneous.

Um but it's not a huge financial aid practice, just how we're doing our operation is going to be different.

So building the model on the backside is is a labor-intensive portion.

Uh before I take the other questions, I'll just say this too.

My hope is that as you are seeing the changes and as you study best practices um and bring them here, that you um that that's ongoing.

So it's not reactionary, it's proactive.

Um, and secondarily, as you have to pivot because of the reality that we're dealing with, that you also are looking at um your budgetary needs so that it's reflected in the budget that we receive or the budget that we must amend.

Um some stuff we could have did and didn't, because it wasn't asked for um or wasn't communicated.

So you get what I'm saying?

Like it's the is the being proactive about looking at what's best to do, um, think of ways to implement it and asking for the resources necessary to do it.

Yeah, just to yeah, just to comment on the budget portion.

I think this is a citywide challenge.

And so I mean, I can come with numbers that would be eye-popping from a street repair number to sewer systems and to operations, you know, and we only have so much money.

And so I think these are great conversations to start having now as we go through that budget process is where we put our dollars.

Because as as a city, we can't solve all the problems.

Not not with the amount of money that we need from an overall infrastructure perspective.

That's out without saying all the other needs that the city has.

Um but I do think it's a good process, you know, and having a plan forward, you know, how are we gonna catch up or make changes?

You just can't do them all at once.

Thank you.

Uh, from committee first.

Um, are there any questions?

Community members?

Yes, madam chair.

Other man bomb.

This bagging operation, so you will not you will stop leaf collection in the traditional way, period.

That is correct.

And what about the folks that still rate their leaves in the distreet?

They don't get fined, arrested, all in jail, what what?

What what?

And the leaves will just sit there indefinitely and cover the catch basins?

So no.

So with leaf collection, we're still gonna have an operation because if you think of a city tree sitting in a terrace area, part of those leaves are gonna fall within the street.

So we're gonna access those leaves.

What this is gonna prevent is going to prevent people from their front lawn and their back lawns putting all the extra leaves there.

So if you consider you're gonna reduce 75% of what's going to fall in the roadway.

And now, do we have some sort of do I want to penalize our residents as they're putting leaves out there?

That's the potential.

Because the way the ordinance says right now is throwing anything within the public right of way is considered littering, with the exception of leaves.

And if that's something we want to move forward with, just like we do with snow operations where people are putting snow into there.

I'm not sure we want to go into just basically penalizing all our folks.

I think we have to see how this is going to transition.

We are still gonna have almost both operations, but we're gonna prioritize bagging.

It's gonna take a while for our citizens to understand there's a shift.

Um, but the more leaves and stuff we keep out of yards, the better it's going to be.

Well, 25% of the city, so if you divide 1,500 miles through, that's a lot of signage.

So I I'm taking a guess we might have it done by the end of next year.

Um I have to sit down with folks, but they already know we're gonna start moving forward.

It's a lot of signage, Madam Chair.

Um Okay.

Along those along that questioning.

All right, President Chris?

Yeah.

Um so I live next door to county owned MMSD owned land.

That's where all the trees are.

Are they responsible for the leaves?

The park across the street is Pulaski.

Is the county gonna ensure that all the leaves in the trees don't come into the public right-of-way?

They're responsible for bagging them or making sure they don't fall into the street.

Well, I think with falls in county parks is within county parks.

I don't think the county rakes them out to the curb for us at all.

There's a lot of trees that get into the street and into the basin.

You know, when we look at, you know, as we go through those fall seasons and you know, we make these big piles and we consolidate and we get these windy fall days that get spread all over the place.

I mean, there's still gonna be residual leaves.

The more we can contain them in a bag is the less that's gonna end up in the right-of-way.

So who's responsible for land that's either county or well the county and the state would be control of their own land, correct?

But if you're gonna call you guys when they don't when they don't rake them, then I call you guys.

Yeah, so yeah, if it comes into the public right away, we're gonna have we'll have to operate like we normally do.

It's just the amount that's falling in those parks would not be for us to pick up.

Okay.

But some of this isn't parkland.

So it might be considered parkland, but it's not a park.

Is that accessible to the public?

Vacant land, vacant lot.

Even the stuff that's vacant lot that the city has, they're responsible.

You guys are responsible then?

Yeah, so vacant property is us, yes.

So there's the 2500 plus properties that the city owns is on the city.

And they don't necessarily get raked out to the curb.

They actually stay on that parcel itself.

And so what will happen is as they go through a full, you know, they'll mulch them as they go through the cutting season, they don't we don't remove those and push those into the public right-of-the-art.

And and just along the lines with leaves and how you mentioned the exceptional parking or two-sided parking.

We have 15 districts.

Two districts for for a very long time, the third and the twelfth have had the parking.

And all that time we've never had a conversation about we need to do something about the leaves because you have two-sided parking or a plan for it, or that we can't rake the leaves because of that issue.

Alderman Baumans had it a year.

And when we look at um the concentration of the flooding and the problems, there are in districts that don't have two-sided parking.

So I want to be very clear that it it may be an issue, but when you look at the map and who's affected by it, it isn't two-sided parking.

It it's it's one thing.

So when we're looking at breaking out, no matter if you're in an exception parking area or not, we're gonna eliminate the raking of leaves, even if you're doing alternate site parking.

So I mean that's still less leaves sitting within the public right-of-way that we have to basically push.

I just make it sound is like the two-sided parking is an issue, and there's three districts affect the parking lot.

And I can speak to that with personal knowledge.

Uh the problem I have is yes, you're working, but you're not working smart, in my humble opinion.

Yes, there's two-sided parking, which makes the parking lane inaccessible, but that's overnight.

During the day, my streets are almost completely open because everybody's at work.

If somebody came through there with a sweeper at 10 a.m., they'd have no problem getting to the curb lanes.

When they come through at 10 p.m., they're cleaning the center line of the street.

Yes, that sweeper is technically working.

It shows up on the books.

Yep, there's another eight hours, another eight man hours, the vehicle is out sweeping, sweeping the center line because they can't get access to the curb.

Perfect.

That's not working smart.

Come at 10 a.m.

Adjust your work schedules when the vehicles are gone, which I think is generally the case in all our exception areas.

And during the day, the streets open up and the curb lanes are accessible.

I've been harping on this for ten years.

And it just seems to fall on deaf ears.

And now it's the chickens are coming home to roost, and now there's ten people sitting here angry as hell because their constituents are angry as hell.

Work smart.

Yes, you're working.

I get it.

Hours are being spent.

But work smart.

What what are the um times for both um that you historically use for leaf collection uh street sweeping?

Street sweeping goes shifts.

The shifts.

So street sweeping, there are two shifts.

So you go during the day, and then you do have third shifts.

So you do have two shifts, so they're constantly out there.

And we have uh 31 pieces of equipment that are out there and schedules that are tied to that.

So they're continuing to working out.

There are two separate areas.

We street sweep downtown area once a week.

Uh and part of that of us with assistance at Bid 21, because they do a lot of cleanup along here.

Uh we have the basically a combined sewer system, as mentioned before, we swipe twice a month.

And then we have the outer districts, which are farther um south, north, and west, that we do once a month.

And so those are part of our stormwater management plan.

Um but then it comes into what time are they coming to to schedule?

There are shifts that kind of go through.

Even if we go during the day, we're still not gonna access everywhere.

So um, but that's kind of the schedule we've always had for years.

I I will say that in the past, not now, but a few years ago when we had 569 staff that we had vacant, the first thing to knock off would be street sweeping because of our guaranteed collect garbage collection and recycling.

Um our numbers have stabilized now.

They're not where exactly we're wanting, because we still have vacancies about in the department of about 270, but we've gone a long way, which is a good thing.

Um so we haven't had as many issues filling some of those spots.

Um, sometimes we have so much illegal dumping that we'll have to pivot to that operation.

There's a lot of things that we do, and what is the most pressing we try to navigate?

And there's always vacancies and and and people that take vacation, etc.

But we're in a better situation than we have been in the past few years.

Any other questions from committee?

Arteman Westmore then Ottoman Brown.

In relation to bagged leaf collection.

Is that at the curb?

Is it at the garbage collection point?

Yeah, so the goal is gonna be at the curb, so right at that terrace area, so we can run an operation.

Think of it like we did with the Christmas tree collection a few years ago.

We wanted to have that same kind of process there.

And so the good thing now is as we move forward with this and we notice this in the floods is we have routeware, which is our regular garbage folks can actually identify and start adding this to the system, so it's like putting dots on a map.

And so that we can pivot our operation pretty quickly.

Now, how will they be picked up?

Manually, automated?

It's it's manually.

So it's more work on our folks to pick up leaf bags than it would be from pushing.

Okay.

Now if there is a bag of leaves that sits there and it gets snowed on or rained on, and they go to pick it up, and the leaves fall through the bottom, then what?

Do they because it happens in our constituents that reach out all the time?

I mean, I don't know what sanitation policy is, so maybe we can clear that up, but they have yard waste that sits out there, they request the collection.

Garbage uh sanitation workers come pick it up, it falls through, they leave it.

Yeah, so that's maybe cleaning that up and taking it more.

I think that's a conversation we have to figure out because there's there's there's there's options across the country of just using paper bags, which is what a majority use.

There are some communities that use plastic bags, and then we'll they'll cut them open just so they don't get affected.

But then, of course, then you have environmental impact of how much more plastic do you want to use.

So there's there's a there's a con to that as well.

And so as we kind of we're we're still trying to build this right now, is what makes the most sense.

Worst case scenario, let's say your bag deteriorates, it's right inside on that terrace area that we can figure out, and what a lot of communities will do is almost like a skid crew.

You come through and you'll have to pick them up.

And to put some grass seed, but they're not in the sitting in the roadway, clogging up trains and et cetera.

So that's what we're navigating, and it's but it's not uncommon across the country.

So currently, what's sanitation's policy if that bag falls, the bottom falls out?

We'll have to come back and clean it out because we had to delay service, and maybe it's not because of us, it could be Mother Nature.

That's the one.

We can't take that.

No, it should be taken.

And that's what it should be within the system.

You know, this is this is what's gonna be nice.

Is here's a bag, you can see it sitting there, you can see the pile, so we will have knowledge that and when we can get to it, depending on what phase we are in the seasonality.

Got it.

Thank you.

Any other questions from Oh Brouwer, Otterman Brown?

Yeah, thank you so much.

Um so this is first of all, this is this is some some good options for areas like the east side where we struggle with um a clogged catch basin that and I know that wasn't the majority of the flooding that occurred with this last storm system, but we do have periodic storm systems where it gets clogged either with the catch basically gets clogged with debris or leaves.

So I'm I'm really excited about this.

I'm really excited to roll this out to constituents.

I think a lot of them will be very happy about this idea of scheduled sweepings.

Um just a couple logistical questions about that.

Um with the uh the scheduled sweepings, are we going to be we will be towing to remove, right?

So that we have a completely unobstructed.

We're not just gonna say, oh, you know, Mr.

Jones forgot to move his car, well well, we'll just go around it.

We will remove that vehicle so there'll be a completely unobstructed block where we could sweep and clip the entire thing.

That's good.

Um when we remove that vehicle, are we going intending to take it to the tow lot or are we gonna move it to the closest, nearest opening in a on a street?

And will there be a citation to cover the cost then of that tow truck the removal, or how is that gonna work?

Yeah, thank thanks for bringing that up.

Um, so what the the goal is here to relocate in the neighborhood.

We don't want folks to drive all the way to the toll lot nor the capacity for that.

So yeah, um, when we've done these pilots before, we find a location in some of our denser neighborhoods.

This is where we have to figure out exactly where we're going to tow to make sure we can access that.

And so the sweeping operation takes over two days because you're gonna have one side that people can still park on their block on the one side and then flip-flop the next day.

Um but there will be a site, there's a there's a toe fee and there's a citation because you're illegally parked.

And so that will be addressed and ticketed just like we do for any other event uh in a similar situation.

And so that would be um, and so that would help to cover the cost then to this.

So we had some questions about cost of implementation, at least for the towing.

That would is there generally cost recovery then when we are towing somebody with the citation that's issued?

So the citation would be separate.

So you have a to you know there's a tow fee that's there, so we have private contractors that will tow and relocate, and so we have a statute of limit uh the there's a limitation on how much we can charge the public, uh, but then there's a citation because you're legally parked.

So two different things, but that's the total fine.

Okay.

Okay, cool.

And then um just uh actually I'll I had some other comments, but I'll wait to get other alders to um get their questions answered.

Um I would suggest as you build out that plant that you also um build um e-text in it, like so that people can sign up to be texted and reminded about the data that's coming through just to reinforce the signage.

Um any other questions from committee members?

Committee members.

Um, if we're now from committee members.

Um I'm gonna go to Pratt first because she was uh smile saying then I'll go to you Otter Woman, let me try which then more.

My question is for MMSD.

Um I represent Lincoln Park, which is where some of the first work was done to help alleviate some of the flooding.

Um there are over 15 homes that were lost there about 20 years ago during a flood.

Um also represent 35th Street, where the 35th Street Basin is, and I represent uh the West Basin, rather, and I'm gonna re I represent where the 35th Street um or reputting something there.

However, along the entire corridor, the on Capitol, even with all these improvements, I have flooding at 35th, 27th, 20th, and 9th.

And 16th every time it floods.

I um I guess I what I'm looking for, and I think what people are looking for is why?

Why is this happening?

What are we not doing, or what can we do to stop that?

And yeah, I'm I'm I'm I guess I'm frustrated in that, and that I'm using TID money that should be improving streets to do sewer work, right?

And I shouldn't have to, but I am because I know that we need this done.

So how can I justify this?

The you know, I know the deep tunnel helps us, all of this helps us, but how can we tell people how this is working for them, what we're doing going forward, um, because they don't see it.

I don't I don't think they see it, they don't feel it, especially especially in that particular corridor.

But even when I put this file forward, I put forward intersections all over the city where we I can go to the intersection.

I know it's gonna be flooded regardless of how much rain happens in several parts of the city.

Um I know for sure Capitol, because that's my district.

I know for sure it's Atonia in in Kylie, because I or Tetonia and Kinsey, that's my district.

Um, but there's 97th in Hampton.

There is 31st in hot pondillac, they're all over the city.

So how what are we doing in those areas specifically?

I want to know to to alleviate that issue.

Sure.

And thank you for the question.

Yes.

It it really comes down to where's the water coming from when these areas flood?

Is it coming out of the creek and Lincoln Creek issue?

Is it coming out of the creek and flooding the area?

Or is it flooding?

You mentioned intersections, that's more the local system that you have to look at.

So it's a partnership that we all have to work on together.

But the flood management projects is the water that gets to the creeks, and how do we manage that water in the creek?

If it I've not two weeks ago, I did not hear of out-of-bank, what we call out-of-bank flooding from the river.

So um that tells me it's more of a stormwater issue versus a flood.

I know this is confusing, a stormwater issue versus a flood management issue, but that's what we have to deal with on this.

I think you said earlier the design storms for storm sewers were 20 10 year.

Yeah.

And we had a 25-year event hit two weeks ago.

We had a thousand-year hit uh last August.

Our design flood management is the hundred-year event.

So it it really has to be a conversation where that water come from.

And if it and I did not hear of out-of-bank flooding two weeks ago, and even um uh in August, there was just limited out-of-bank flooding that we heard of.

If there's intersections that are flooding, and Commissioner Chambers called me during the storm.

Um, if there's intersections that are flooding, that's where we need to look at how we manage that storm water to get it to the creek.

Yes.

If that makes sense.

Yeah.

I mean, that that's my question.

That's are we are we again uh making those intersections higher?

What are we doing so that we are directing that water away from there it's pooling um at 20th and Capitol.

You l you cannot go through 20th and Capitol if it rains.

You cannot get on the freeway at 9th and Capitol if it rains.

Um you can't I mean 27th and Capitol under every bridge in the city.

I mean, we saw that this time.

Um I think that's one of the good things about this task force is flood mitigation task force that we talked about a little bit.

Um it was formed about a week and a half ago.

Um we're meeting here soon, and we're going to try to integrate the county's work, the city's work, and actually all the municipalities' work and MMSD's work.

Because you have to follow that drop.

It's really simple, you have to follow that drop of water as it goes through the system and what's causing it to back up or not back up and try to work at it from that's that angle.

That's why we're installing green infrastructure to manage water where it falls.

That's why we're working on private property with the those laterals that go from the homes to the street to try to reline those pipes so that they don't take in more water.

You're just trying to reduce the volume of water that comes into the system.

Does the PW have an answer for the Capitol?

Um I'm asking because I share capital with uh Art of Woman Pratt, and she's right.

Those particular areas, and you know, Commissioner, I we personally called you when we're driving around seeing it ourselves.

So is there for Capitol, is there a specific um reason?

I would say multiple reasons.

Yes, uh City Engineer mentioned earlier.

At any specific location, there are multiple uh reasons for why there may be flooding it, whether it's the drainage structures themselves if they're clogged with trash or leaves or anything like that.

The amount of impervious surface that might be in the area, and especially in commercial districts where you have a large amount of parking and things like that.

Uh our infrastructure in terms of how does it pass through the system?

Like so 20th and Capitol is a good example of where there are a couple large storm sewers that pass through that area on their way to MSD's basins uh on the the northwest and east basins.

So any one of those things can definitely play a factor in here.

Um keeping the structures open, certainly is one of the things that we're working towards.

Uh we can look at localized solutions in terms of adding structures if that's the right thing to do.

Uh those add other maintenance elements, other traffic elements, uh utility conflicts, things like that.

So it's not always a guarantee that we can just simply put in more basins and that will take care of the problem.

Um but we do uh look at those possibilities.

There's a whole series of green infrastructure along that uh route.

Um and then as properties get redeveloped, uh stormwater management requirements will kick in that require them to contain more of the stormwater on site as those properties get redeveloped.

Can we um you all keep track of the specific areas that um every time we rain um that is particular flooding, right?

Um is it possible to get maybe a list of those for maybe the last five years?

And as you all look at new projects in an area, um infrastructure-wise, are you also looking at the storm mitigation piece and what you could infrastructure do to have?

Yep.

Anytime there's a roadway replacement, we always look at the whole entire system at the same time.

It's an opportunity for sewers to get there.

So any reconstruct that comes through, not high impact paving, because that's just a maintenance when we look at a full reconstruct the sewers are always looked at upgraded, catch basin, etc.

Uh I do want to say we do have a hot list.

Um your potential intersections that constantly flood.

And what sewer maintenance does is when they know these are going to go uh a rain's gonna come, they actively go out to those basins to make sure they're clear.

Um it doesn't necessarily stop you know surface flooding floods.

I did see them at 20th and capital.

I'm saying like so I know that something is so we do have a hot list that we try to go to because it's just it's a regular occurrence and then the basin zone.

That is deeper than that.

Yeah, correct.

So I mean, there's that's why you're yeah, there's they can get that the basin itself to make sure it's clear, but there's there could be other things like uh Kurt had mentioned.

Not if you're on that point on the point of Lincoln Creek, since we own Eric, I know we're gonna go to another side of the area.

Um and thank you for giving me the opportunity.

Um I want to add another area that I called both of y'all on on this um around Lincoln Creek, because Lincoln Creek was the heaviest part that was significantly impacted in both August and this one.

Um in particular between 60th from Villard to 60th to 51st from Villard to Cerberus Spring, where um we had nine, well past the springs on Thursday.

Um where we had eight blocks completely filled with water, and I know I talked to you, Commissioner, on that um that I drove through.

Luckily I have a vehicle that can drive through it.

Um that drove through it, and that's consistently again impact.

And I also know from August, um, you know, we had a lot of houses that were damaged with foundation issues, you know, in that same area.

Um so I know um, you know, um, you know, Mr.

Mews brought up the initial Lincoln Creek area project that happened with that with that early 2000s?

Um, early 2000s is about 119 million dollars of work.

And I know we talked about this, but what are the plans moving forward to further improve that because I feel moving forward, that area is going to get continuously to get severely impacted.

And I know that we are doing the 30 feet the 35th Street Basin project, but are there any other location further north that we are looking to possibly um add to that as well?

The one I could think of is Oak Leaf Park near, you know, the Monomine um valley, you know, Monomine Park in my district off of uh Mill Road.

Um if there are any other um projects that we can you know consider moving forward with the Yeah, we'll look at everything.

I mean, we we need to look at these open spaces so that we can store the water there as opposed to getting into people's homes and bases, uh basements.

Uh what we are looking at right now is some accelerated green infrastructure work in the um Lincoln Creek watershed because you're right last August and then two weeks ago just nailed with the rainfall.

The 15 inches of rain hit in the Lincoln Park in the Lincoln Creek uh watershed.

So anything we can do to manage that water where it falls with green infrastructure will do.

And then we're gonna uh also we have this pipe check program where we pay to uh replace or line laterals from the home to the street.

We're gonna target that area as well to try to help with that.

Okay.

And then um final question is I know some of the projects with the basins um like Wilson Park, is the goal um of these projects to do something similar to what MMSD did with Tulsa and Hart Park.

Um sorry.

No, you did.

You didn't want to interrupt.

Uh Pulaski Park is probably the best example.

This is a beautiful park that uh is a partnership with Milwaukee County and uh a hard park would be something somewhere it was designed to flood.

I know there's a lot of issues last August where people thought why is the uh football field flooding.

It was meant to flood, that's what it was designed for.

That kept it out of people's homes.

So um it would be the work plan for Jackson Park will look a lot like Pulaski Park and Wilson Park would be the same.

And then last thing, uh Commissioner Kreske, um, you know, I know as far as with the uh the exception parking and you know the tolls and the redirect fees and everything, especially with us uh shifting over to bagging um things.

My hope, and and I I maybe we had to put a file out.

My hope is we can use those funds as opposed to putting them into somewhere else is to put them into subsidizing some of those leaf bags for the residents to purchase in this um moving forward so you know we can take some of the stress off.

Yes, we are punishing those who are parking, but we should still be helping those um that are you know gonna have to pay two dollars or so bags or anything like that.

So should we should really explore um you know creative ways to help those residents, especially as we make this significant shift um in processes throughout the city.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity.

Thank you so much, Alder Woman Um Cogs, Chairwoman Cogs.

Thank you, Alderwoman Andrea Pratt, for um introducing this and um allowing me to co-sponsor it right at the moment.

Thank you for allowing e-comments.

Um I was doing a quick tally about E 80 percent or so were um from my district predominantly on Logan, Lennox, Russell, Bay, Lime Barger, and Delaware.

And like my good colleague um Alderman Chambers mentioned um two parts of the city that are quite far away from each other but are going through the same thing.

Um I think to build off of Alderwoman Pratt's comments.

She started a conversation, but I I don't feel like we we got still the answer that some of our people are looking for, which is um why is it harsher in certain parts, certain hot spots?

I mean, their property values are plummeting.

They which hurts our tax base.

We all just got, you know, it I know it was no one's plan, but getting an assessment right in the middle of the pain that the city has endured in between the flooding, can't drive on the streets with the potholes, and your basement is full of water, and maybe a tree fell down.

Of course, that's not part of the city's fault, but it is painful.

I am feeling the pain of my constituents.

Um, and it's really rough because it's it's hard to say, well, that's that's weather, these are exceptional events.

What they're looking for is that these are exceptional events, the climate is changing, and what are we doing to respond?

Um that's what they're looking for.

And today, when they've rebuilt from August, they many cannot claim again in a calendar year if they even were lucky to claim the first insurance.

They are asking me to ask you all, and I will have to do it, for financial help.

Um this is going to preserve our tax base.

If people are looking to either sell their homes, they'll get less for it.

Well, I mean, you know where I'm going with this.

We've got to find a way to, if it's a um, I think it was called a uh basement uh a basement backup valve, the mothership, which we've probably seen many articles from that I have to speak into the record.

It is up for a James Beard award.

This is right off of Lincoln Avenue in the Logan area that we're talking about near the Army Reserve.

Great bar, by the way.

Well, I'm not I'm just getting started actually.

I got more.

It is a great bar.

But think about the the just embarrassment, if you will, that they are up for a James Beard award.

They rose from the ashes of being closed for three months in August.

They got back up, and they have now all that um work that they did and repair, they had a close down again.

They are in a hot spot.

And it's just embarrassing to me that they're helping us shine our light as a city.

We're up for the Michelin, but yet they have standing water in their basement.

They can't produce ice, they can't do um what they need to do.

The people that work there are employees in my district.

Across the street is rot washer.

I have a email and I've sent it to y'all from the CEO who said that their HR and their control room was completely ruined.

Hundreds of workers in that factory live in my district.

So I I we've we've we've taken this angle from many ways.

I'm gonna take the economic way, is when we add up all of this pain and suffering, there is a major impact to the city of Milwaukee.

And what my constituents are looking for is what can they do today?

Can they claim something?

Can they ask for funding?

Is there a certain uh valve or anything that that can be done in the basement?

What can they do with MMSD?

Um I'm they're looking for specifics because is there a map like we're asking for when is there areas that have like less impervious pay pavement?

We need to put each heat map on top of the other heat map, and you're right, have some really specific solutions.

But what would we say to Logan, Lenox, Russell Bay, Line Barger, Delaware, and all my friends a little further north, those residents today, what can they do today?

They've gone through three water heaters, they've went through two washers and dryers, a couple refrigerators.

What can be done today?

Today, I mean, today is a real challenge, right?

I mean, because uh all the women, you know, and I and if I'm misinterpreting what you're asking, please interrupt me.

But you know, the financial impact of this, right?

Which is which is real, and the the emotional impact, which is real as well.

Um the department is not authorized for reimbursements of that type.

I mean, the process is as you know and many others do.

This is the claims process managed by the clerk if the individuals feel like the city is culpable for those for those issues.

Um we would have to have discussions, including discussions that would include, you know, the finance and personnel committee and others if there was some sort of approach that the the city wanted to take from a financial perspective to to assist.

That's not something that exists within DPW uh today.

Um when it comes to the future, that's where I I do think um, you know, as as Kevin mentioned and others mentioned, um, you know, we have this task force coming, and I I'm hoping that we talk directly with some of these folks.

You know, as you said, you shared emails with me, others have shared emails with with others at the table too and try to figure out what we can do to address the specific circumstances in specific areas because those circumstances do vary depending on the topography, the sewer system, and other things going on.

And even the individual property owners as well.

You had asked me to pause you.

So I get the today thing, but why so we're not geologically, we had a conversation two days ago.

We don't have Lincoln Creek.

Why those streets that I laid, they want answers as to like what is their geological challenge.

Um and maybe that's not a today thing as well, but we need to we need to get back to folks as to they weren't even aware that they lived in a hot spot.

You know what I'm saying?

So how could they even mitigate it or remediate it?

And and this is what we've we've got to really highlight.

Who's on the city-county task force, madam chair?

Is is there a number of alders, which which alders are on there?

Right now it's just technical folks, so it's the commissioner and the technical folks?

Okay.

I'm sorry, uh technical folks.

But we will be uh talk, we haven't met yet, so we'll see who else we want to add to that and then well I would like to make a request today that there be an Alder person because we're we're there's no one I mean if you're technical, which I appreciate because you can see these are very technical things.

I've had to watch the video like ten times.

But we with all due respect, they're not necessarily calling the commissioner yourself.

We have the anecdotal people driving through, like my colleague, we need to have the voice of the actual people on something like that.

That special task.

Can you ask the number?

Yeah, how many people are on the task force, the city county.

So please can you put at least some city legislative branch?

We get the calls.

I don't know how to stress this out.

Um that needs to be on there.

But along those lines, I the the this task force is put together, it it seems like every player at the table you've been in relationship or communication with.

So I I I don't see the I guess why now to me when everyone, the media mentioned that's gonna be part of this task force.

You're already talking to, you're already working with, you've dealt with the county, whether it's at Pulaski, Jackson, City Engineers.

I w I don't know understand what the differences of the relationship now.

Well, we've had two big storms last August and two weeks ago.

So those really prompted us to look at this.

As I said on the one side, we have three different systems private sewers, municipal sewers, and our sewers.

And sometimes those don't connect, and so we need to make sure that there's good uh collaboration between the three uh different sewer systems, uh, try to work with uh different communities on how their systems drain.

How can we identify these?

I hadn't heard about hot spots before, but uh so if we have these hot spots, can we then go in and try to uh target those areas first?

It's just a priority system where you have to start from the worst areas and then work back from that.

So just to be clear, it hasn't happened until now.

The conversation that we have this prioritize prioritizing these issues now after three floods, two years that prompted after all the years you guys have been talking to one another.

We have worked to get together on all these issues, but now, like I said, I just heard about hot spots.

So if it's street flooding that you're concerned about, where are those street flooding locations are at the intersections, and then how do we bring that together to try to drain those better in the future?

Because ultimately Pratt's flooding isn't based on huge storms.

It happens every year.

Okay, I'm gonna do my last comment because something was unclear to us over here.

The scheduled street sweeping is that only on the double-sided streets, or are you implementing that citywide?

So that is only in the exception street areas, which is going to be mandated.

The other portion of the city that are just normal parking, that will have a normal sweeping, because they're already alternate site parking, which gives us access to those parking lanes.

Okay.

That's that's great.

And then just to conclude, Madam Chair, thank you.

Um 2.7 billion gallons, that's what it was, into our water ways.

So something's got to change.

Um it's it's important to not normalize these weather patterns.

Um we can change some of it in our ways.

We have a very ambitious climate and equity task force.

We have done a lot of green infrastructure.

Um the federal government has been an enemy of this type of work, so it has to be said.

We push forward, and the current federal administration has been creating barriers along the way, and this is coming home now.

So we have to stand up and fight for what we know our people need um no matter what, because they're paying the price.

So thank you so much, Madam Chair.

Thank you so much, um, Madam Chair, committee members, um, for allowing this conversation today.

Um I just really really quick few um questions um going back to timeline.

What would the communication plan be and timeline look like for rolling out um these new initiatives?

So from the bag leaf operation, we're already trying to work on the communication plan and and any platform that's including getting information to alders as well to put in their newsletters.

Um so that's that that's the easier one because and then pivoting over into the exception street areas.

We're still building what that looks like, and so there's gonna be a conversation where we start and what the local alder is to say we're gonna start here and and moving forward.

I guess I think some of our folks don't know if they live on Exception Street or not, and what that means.

Um and so building a map and something visual, someone can see these are the roads.

I mean, the exception streets are built on our website right now, so the public wants to go on and look up on the city's website.

It'll show exactly which streets are exceptional now to get a precursor of where they what this impact is to their neighborhood, so they'll know right now, but we will build better things in flyers and newsletters and just everything else to get this out as we kind of open this up over time.

Got it, thank you.

Um and again, I have to concur that I appreciate that we have the opportunity to use the e-comments.

I've had an opportunity to um read through several of them.

Um and one in particular from one of the residents in one of my neighborhoods is something that um continues to be an issue in our office, is you know, there are requests that are made in a cella all the time.

Um, and quite a few of them are always marked that they're done.

Um, and unfortunately they haven't.

There, you know, I have residents that have requests that are still open and has been open for multiple years, right?

And so um if you all can talk to me a little bit about um, and and I've brought this up with the department before, like how can we do because if it's you know what, we get so many requests, we don't have the people power to do it.

I mean, I'd rather us say that so that we can think about you know what's that strategy or what's the plan is to get some of these requests fulfilled.

Um but if you can talk a little bit about how can we address making sure because I tell people to I push people all the time, you know, use a you know, use the mobile action app, call the city, right?

And they put these in this information into the system, and you know, I would say for the most part, you know, a lot of it gets done, but there's still quite a few that don't um get addressed.

How do you all, you know, if we're continuing to push um them using this particular platform, how do we work to make sure that what we're asking residents submit that they get done?

I would like to know the one-offs.

And so there has been a transition over the past couple years of into what call it a Milwaukee apps-based IT background and transitioning over to a seller for requests.

And so I would like to know the one-offs, because I want folks to call 286, I w or 286 city.

I want folks to put in a click for action because that's what helps us get the work done faster.

Instead of just going one spot here, one spot there, they can do groups.

Correct.

So I mean, if you do have something that's out there for that long, and I said this to every alder, if it's not getting addressed by my staff, I need to know, and it was it lost in the system, is it just they're not doing it?

And I can respond because that's that's far and few between.

Um, because a majority of those requests, if it comes in the potholes, it comes in the clean.

Yeah.

Our crews are seeing all those, and this is why we constantly are trying to put that message forward.

It is easier to put it in the system than it is to call myself, and then I will get it over to someone else who gets it in there so it's delayed actually, compared to just someone actually putting in for click for action.

Um, so but I would, I mean, if anybody has one-offs like that, I would like to know what those are.

Is that something that we can like each district can request um through um IT department to say, hey, can you pull a list of again?

I'm not sure if it's possible.

Can you pull a list of outstanding, you know, a seller items that are more than 30 days later, whatever.

I I would love to see if that's a possibility so that we get a sense of what what is is it oh it's always this, you know, because of X, Y, and Z, right?

Like I would really love to understand what's out there or what's not being addressed.

So again, it's an opportunity for us to to look at um other solutions.

Um I really quick as well.

Um there were so also some complaints about, and I just need to understand the mesh over the sewer grades.

I know sometimes we do that for construction time.

Um is it is it just specifically for construction time?

Do we remove it?

Like, how does that work?

Because I don't know if we went to, oh, we're now putting mesh under greats.

Can you explain that a little bit for me?

Yeah, absolutely.

Um uh so if you see that the it's usually black mesh, it's usually sticking out around the edge of of the grate, right?

Um so that was installed by a contractor or or uh in some cases city staff specifically do to meet erosion control requirements.

So that is to try to control the amount of silt and other runoff from a construction site getting into the sewer system.

Um those should be removed when the project is done.

Um if they are uh forgotten for some reason and someone notices it, they should flag it for us, let us know.

Um and and however uh you know they can choose to try to get hold of us.

Um we we do like to know when that happens and try to identify who did it and and and how.

So those can be installed by our contractors doing our projects, but they can also be installed in the public right away by private utilities that are doing work in the right of way as well.

So um it's similar to the what's going on with this hole in the ground question, we would have to chase it down, but we do want to know about those and get those cleared if there's not active construction nearby.

That's awesome.

And I definitely want to take the time to plug the adopt a adopter great program.

Um would love to have some communication plan about that as well so that we can have our regist residents again.

We're we're doing a lot um with a very little.

Um, and you know, over time we're sort of you know tasking our residents a little bit more where you know their taxes are up and they're wondering why their roads aren't done and why they're getting flooding, you know, all I mean they're they're feeling it.

And so if there are opportunities for you know, small ways for us to support, there should definitely be some sort of communication plan around that so that our residents can because many of them want to help our city, they want to chip in.

Um, but it there I think there needs to be some concerted efforts around plans um to be able to do that.

Thank you so much, madam chair.

Yeah, auto moment.

Oh thank you so much, uh Madam Chair.

I apologize for my voice today.

Um I do I just wanted to chime in and say thank you.

I do concur with all my colleagues because I do know that um we're still getting calls, and I did mention that to you too.

We're still getting calls even from last year of people who still are trying to recover from the flood from last year, and then they're getting hit again.

And and um so um I d I just concur with that.

Um, but also with this recent flooding, um, whereas my area might not have been hit as hard, but just trying to navigate from that far northwest side to get downtown.

Every turn I made was a flooded area.

And again, like all the chambers, I was in a in a high-sitting vehicle, so I could push through it, but I wasn't going to, right?

But I would pull over, call it in, turn the corner, pull over, call it in, and I just kept doing that to the point it just got frustrating.

Um but I think after the fourth call, I just said, you know what, I might as well just stay on the phone with you until I get downtown because every corner I turn, I'm calling you back to tell you that there's another one.

Um but what she did was they gave me the ticket numbers for each one so I can follow back.

So I don't know if that's what my um Alderman Moore, Alder Woman was saying about being able to track back and make sure that those areas were being um addressed.

Uh so maybe that's something that should we just encourage our constituents to get those numbers when they call so that we can track easily track those.

Yeah.

All right, thank you.

Um I think Ottoman um Burkanias, they move on.

Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, committee members.

Thank you everyone for being here.

Um I have kind of a I have a question later, but a premature, a premature announcement to make.

Uh Alderman Stamper and I have been working on a project with uh clean and green to have paper bags available at various city locations for the spring cleanup.

Those bags were delayed a little bit uh getting to DPW.

Thank you to DPW and the library and the fire department for helping distribute and locate these.

Uh but we will announce very soon.

Uh we have eight locations already in uh throughout the district.

Uh we've been engaged with alders to get the right locations throughout the city where neighbors can come by a location and pick up these paper bags for free.

I think now more than ever, it will be even more important to use them in spring, maybe save one or two for the fall.

Um and this is a really just a pilot model part of clean and green that will allow uh us to set up a uh a test of how we can distribute bags out to uh residents throughout the city.

Uh so those locations um are started.

Um there are a couple elders that I think will want to add a location closer to their district.

But uh please check your emails for those as well.

In my district this time, the last week's storm, uh I had a number of hot spots of six hot spots from August, only three still had problems last week.

Which I think is big movement or a big improvement.

But those locations are those residents there are still hurting, and one new hotspot popped up uh where a elderly couple uh had their basement wall collapse.

They're gonna lose their house.

They're gonna lose their life savings and their life's work because of the flood and insurance is denied their claim.

We don't have resources or none of our city programs fit that problem.

So I want to thank uh Commissioner Arroyo Vega for personally reaching out to those to that family to help.

Um but our our resources and our options at the city for that kind of a storm are really limited.

As it turns out, that small street in front of their home has two sewer grates.

They were both clogged.

DPW came out, broomed it, right?

But then just recently we had a little bit more rain and that sewer was still clogged and still flooded the street again.

So we have a maintenance program in the city to regularly suction sewers, storm sewers.

Why wasn't the department made aware that brooming the the grate is insufficient and having proper maintenance in this location where there was a hundred where there was hundreds of thousands of dollars of loss across the street?

Why wasn't a vacuum truck sent there until we raised all hell to make sure that that happens?

Because that would that was only cleared out this week.

Today's Wednesday.

So that excuse me.

So that specific location.

Um our crews were out there during the initial storm event on I believe that Wednesday night.

Uh you're right.

They did scrape the debris that was off the great sound.

That area had a fair amount of flooding on the street itself.

At that time, you know, they cannot get out there and jet that line or back out that line.

Their job is to get the water flowing, get that water down into the sewer system, and frankly move on to the next because there are so many other calls to uh address.

And the very next time some the very next time we got a little bit of rain that street flooded again.

Yes, absolutely.

And I understand I think that it probably is an instance where have we been back out there with someone would have recognized yes, this line needs to be jetted.

I can't speak to why that did or did not happen, but once that second call did come in, we did get out there, we got that jetted.

I know we talked to uh the neighbor across the street to confirm that we were at the right location and everything.

Sometimes there is a location mix up, but um we did get that.

There are only two storm drains on the entire block.

Um, what's the regular maintenance schedule for jetting sewers in the city?

How how how many decades does it take for the department to get down to my street before they'll come back again?

So as far as the structures themselves, uh they are either on a three-year or one year cycle, depending on uh the type of structure that is.

Uh that process is mostly looking at removing the debris that exists in the structure.

Uh if we get notified that we phrase that.

When they're out there cleaning out the structure, they may not necessarily know that that drain line is clogged.

That's more of a reactive process.

So if we get a call, you know, through click fraction or through the app, that's when that uh determination is made as to if that can be or not if it can be uh uh jetted, but that it should be jetted.

And how many sewer jet crews do we have in the city?

Uh so during the last flood control uh we had about 20 crews out there.

I believe there are eight of them that have jetting capabilities.

Uh they are not necessarily jetting during storm events if they can get the debris off the grate and get the water down at that time.

That's the first priority is get that water down, get it off the street.

Uh the jetting comes through after the fact, um, whether it's by just what we call routine maintenance, but that's going by quarter section by quarter section and performing that cleaning or on an ass needed basis on an on-call basis.

And how many of those big jet machines do we have in the fleet?

I think Kevin knows the answer.

Yeah, I don't want to commit to a number if Kevin knows.

Well, I was I would know the backs, which is we have four of the backs, but uh I'm not sure on the jetting side of it.

I believe it is also four jet packs.

Yeah.

So four.

And oh, there's four.

Is that enough to take care of the entire city?

Because two of them are brand new.

We just I just saw them in the budget.

Right?

So we've doubled our fleet in the last year to do to to address this.

Is that enough?

Much of that is replacement level.

Um retiring older vehicles to replace new ones.

Uh we have been adding new what are called hydrocranes, which is another vehicle you didn't mention, but it's sort of the clam shell style of um machine that removes the debris from the structures.

We are adding one of those every year as trying to get ahead of the old ones breaking down essentially, but we are in a little bit of a hole on the front.

Um we are I'm adding jetbacks and uh hydro cranes to every budget.

Okay.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you.

Uh any other questions?

I had a question.

Um is someone from Eco and from the Office of Equity at the County on the task force.

As of right now, no, but the for when we meet the first time, we're gonna say who else should be in the eco is there at least.

Thank you.

Um Are you out here, Madam too?

How are I think?

Uh and then Les Mormon.

Yeah.

Cool.

Uh so a couple different things.

Um to what Alder Woman Pratt was saying regarding these hot spots, I think we will I would suggest that we collect all of those and have some sort of public facing in some way, either through our e-notifies for us or even on the DPW website of here's the hot spots.

It could just be a Google sheet that's out there.

Here's every hot spot that we know floods every single time.

Here's the result of our investigation, what we've determined is happening, and here's the steps that we're taking.

I mean, because what I'm seeing and hearing is that people at least want, and I I I'm fairly certain there's a few of those in in district three as well.

Um I will ask constituents to let me know where those are as well.

But you know, just we can just have that list publicly available.

Here's where they are, here's what our investigation, or here's when it will be investigated.

Either I'm not sure the tools that you use for investigating, but we'll deploy them, and then here's what here's what our next steps are.

And those next steps, I mean, that could be a whole bunch of accelerated infrastructure, you know, and infrastructure spending, right?

And do we have the money for that or not?

Is the question, but I think the public at least wants to just know that we're looking at it, that we're investigating it, what we're what we're doing.

I mean, that's what people want, because I you know, I experienced this too, I'm sure you guys do as well.

Like, you know, when you go up to one of these corners and it's the same flooded corner, again and again, it's like what the heck is going on?

And so if even if we're able to just publicly like say, we know this is happening, here's what needs to happen, and of course it's gonna cost this many millions of dollars, this many hundreds of thousands.

Which library are we gonna close to make that happen?

If that's the question that we have to put out there, and I'm not suggesting that as a political thing, I'm being a little sarcastic when I say that, but like just illustrating that we have a limited resource world, at least the public then knows.

You know, that that's what that's what's going on, and and it's gonna take, you know, there's been some public discourse around you know completely undoing our combined sewer and water system.

I mean, I mean, I don't even you know how many billions of dollars is that gonna cost, how many roads will have to be ripped up, how many decades 15 years, 10 years, 20 years to like you know, rip up every street to do that, which I mean maybe in the future if we need to do because of climate change, we need to do these infrastructure upgrades, we maybe need to look at.

Um, but a question I had for you, Commissioner, is um so just oh you know, over the decades, employment trends at DPW.

I know we've had more vacancies in the past, we've been filling them.

I appreciate that.

I appreciate DER working to you know make sure all those get filled.

Um but um over okay.

So in the 80s, 90s, do we have more or less people at DPW?

What have been some of the macro employment trends over the decades with our uh uh department of public works?

So it's a great question.

So getting rid of just the vacancy number, but the the entire FTEs in the 80s and 90s, we had way more individuals in the budget book, period.

And so over years, and you know, there's two percent cuts, five percent cuts we talk about.

I mean, the the pressure that we've had from our state that says you have to go through a five percent budget cut every year, and that's part of the practice we have to go through.

Our numbers continually every year.

If you go back and look at the budget books, you're gonna see one or two here, you're gonna see one or two here constantly over decades.

And so those numbers start to add up.

There's been some years I think that we've lost, you know, a hundred, two hundred employees, and that was early on.

Um but every year we look at things, and so when what we're trying to do is this is the best question I have to our folks when I walk around is I says I can't get you people anymore.

I go, it just doesn't happen, and we're not budgeted for people.

But there are technology changes that are helping us do their work.

Are there pieces of equipment capital costs that we can purchase one time?

Uh and there's been examples of that.

You know, we've done it in forestry with with grapple cells that have sped up, you know, taking down trees.

That's one example.

We've purchased new equipment to to print signs in some of our sign shops.

Uh and so I'm using our workforce to do that, but you're correct.

I mean, this this department has continually shrunk over the past three decades.

And are we talking hundreds, thousands of people?

Hundreds.

Hundreds of the over decades, yes.

Okay, so so somebody who was an adult in the 80s, um, who could be one of our constituents, um, would have theoretically with more people at DPW enjoyed a higher level of service than is currently even with technological advances than we are currently able to offer, and that is due to budget cuts.

Well, it's complex.

So even right now I still have 270 vacancies with those cuts.

So I mean I'm still not filling them.

So that yeah, if I got to the point where I was 100 percent full and then add because I can add another 200 positions, but if I can't fill them, that's another concern.

I mean, I I will say the market studies that were done to to make wages vary equal to of the outside over the past few years, and I want to thank this council and the mayor for that has stabilized our workforce.

Great and we we have recruitment numbers that are way higher than that they were.

So that's why we are in a good position.

Um but there are the number of folks we have is a lot less.

I mean, street maintenance crews from I mean you're gonna hear it.

We'll give you some numbers when we talk about the potholes.

I mean, when I was in that position in 2019, I had at least 30 more people in that unit than they do today.

Well, and that's just from seven years ago.

And it's happening in every section.

And this is a macro, and I'll just comment on that, that this is a macro trend we're seeing in the public sector, not just here in Milwaukee and we're in Wisconsin, but across this country um with due to rising costs that we face, but also just I mean, frankly, as Alderman Dmitrievich said completely misplaced um priorities here, right?

And I just I just Googled this while we were sitting here, Operation Epic Fury, which is our war against Iran has cost uh one estimate uh between 35 and 50 billion dollars so far.

And uh and it was uh it was uh it was like pulling teeth to get the inflation reduction act through the Senate through some of the lame moderate democrats that wouldn't support that.

Um so even to get a measly 1.7 trillion out of the Senate to code go to local municipalities or even the COVID money, like that I mean that's that's the answer.

We need you know, more support from the federal government from the state government for the richest Wisconsinites and richest Americans to pay their fair share so that it could come back to municipalities like Milwaukee so we can have drivable streets and expect to not be flooded and have employment numbers.

I mean, we should we could use, I bet you we could deploy if we had them double the workers of DPW.

We would have a task for them to do.

Um there is something to improve in the city of Milwaukee that if we had double or triple the number of people in DPW or double or triple the amount of money in the budget, we could accomplish more things that would improve the quality of life, you know, for residents.

And so I just want to, you know, make that comment publicly because I think it really needs to be all this these issues need to be couched in the fact that the you know we talk about vacuum machines.

Well, the richest one percent have a vacuum machine that's vacuuming up all the money in this world into their coffers and uh starving the rest of us, frankly.

Um we need, you know, we talk about these accelerated infrastructure projects.

We're really glad to hear that some of this stuff has moved up.

Thank you.

And again, appreciate all of you here, seriously.

This is this is a really good conversation to have.

But if we want to accelerate these infrastructure improvements, we're going to need, you know, more funding from the feds, from the state.

We cannot just property tax our residents to death to cover the stuff that we want here in Milwaukee.

I mean, it's just it's just unfeasible, right?

There's been, you know, members of Congress have introduced legislation in past Congresses called a Green New Deal that would provide funding for all this stuff.

And of course, you know, our current state of politics that values things like the war with Iran over a Green New Deal.

Um that's we are left suffering now with flooding, where um we've spent, you know, over 35 billion dollars on the war with Iran.

What a complete and epic waste of money uh that we've been engaged in as a country.

And I I really do think, you know, we are in an ecosystem, it is a system, we have to identify all this stuff.

The city of Milwaukee doesn't exist in a vacuum outside of the rest of the United States and the and what the um you know orange buffoon is doing in the White House.

Um it really is uh really is tragic.

So I just want to put that all out there.

I really appreciate all the workers of DPW.

I think overall my assessment from this and from conversations with frontline workers is that you know DPW hasn't failed.

The DPW is being failed in the city of Milwaukee right now.

It needs more resource.

We need to, you know, fight for it um so that we can have the quality of life that we uh deserve here in the city of Milwaukee.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you.

Are there any other um questions from committee?

I'm sorry, on my wife, Marvel.

Uh just a question back to that uh Nesh meeting.

Does that cause any uh obviously with that Neshmetting, there is not normal water flow, right?

Is that cause any stress to area, any other areas because of that?

If I guess if I stress you mean you know, it does it reduce the amount of water that gets in there and which pushes water to other areas.

It can't, yeah.

So it would get high enough, you know, either go over the curb or something.

So it does cause stress the area.

So it does cause stress the area.

Yes, it can.

Okay.

Um with those, I understand why they're there.

Now it's there to collect debris.

How often are those cleared?

In i within the construction zones.

They're supposed to be checked after every rain event and uh clean monthly weather.

Okay.

That's a challenge.

It is absolutely a challenge.

Because it's not only contracts that we control, but it's also uh permanent work by utilities.

Uh it could be a private development that you know is possibly tracking in and out of their site, they would have erosion control out of the code.

For any city projects who is assigned to check those.

Our construction inspectors.

Yeah, it's the construction team.

Got it.

And is there any um document that you know checks the box to say, hey, this is when we mean I quick question.

I'm just we we talk about like what we can do today.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that there are things that we could be missing.

Uh because we don't have systems in place to make sure that you know that's cleared.

And you know, I've got the Lisbon Avenue project, and I know I've checked those personally and they've been gravel and all different types of things.

Yeah.

Yeah, I yeah, I I nothing to refute that experience, Alderman.

I think that's probably definitely accurate.

Um so yeah, we'll follow up and see if that's on the inspection reports I'll I'll get back to you.

Thank you.

Madam Chair.

Um Chambers, honor chambers.

I was going to request you can go, I was gonna request we keep this open.

Uh keep this out.

Um I I just wanted to ask really quick about just um, you know, uh I want to sort of piggyback uh what my colleague Alderman Brower was talking about as far as just support and what's needed.

And and I know that um DPW is one of the um largest departments when we talk about, you know, we call you guys the most, right?

Um we need y'all, right?

Um and looking at how resources is currently allocated, but also thinking about the the workforce as well.

Um is there a plan or is there something that as far as you've got 15 districts here?

Um I know several programs that are you know working with individuals, getting back into the workforce.

Um it and sometimes it seems like we can't put them in fast enough because you all also have people that are retiring every single year.

Um what is the discussion has been like to address our workforce issue because it is an issue having 200, it's a lot of bodies.

You know, even if we get half of those people, the the amount of more work that we can get done, but how are we looking to address that issue?

Yeah, so there in many ways.

So I mean 270 sounds like a lot of folks, but it was 570.

So I mean, and that's only in the past three years where we've recovered that much, which is great because there's constant retirements and there's turnover.

There's there's high stress jobs that are kind of like a parking enforcement officer is hard to keep on.

You know, there there's the trades that are hard to hire.

Um but for the most part, we've seen recruiting numbers up, and we work with our partners in the outside, if it's employment walkie, if it's the WRTP, we're we're trying to get folks that work in the city to work for city government, and not only for us, but also we're a bridge to work with our contractors too, just for the same reason.

So, you know, a lot of the work that we talk about reduced workforces over the years, we use our contractors to do some of that work to supplement.

So it's it's twofold.

We're constantly looking at ways and working with the Department of Employee Relations to get more folks in.

Um so it's we're we're working on uh other outside partners right now to just to figure out what's the best way to get that pipeline and working with our school systems that we've started to build over the past couple of years, you know, like we're we're partnering from our uh urban forestry group has done a great job of time with Vincent High School.

Uh we're done we'll do Pulaski and the mechanics.

So we're trying to get in in MPS is kind of a pipeline for us too in other schools to try to get them like you know, not every job has to be have a college degree.

And so to to get our kids and youth to understand that hey, we have really well-paying jobs with good pensions, and I think it's I think it's something this city has not promoted enough as they look at just the dollar amount, but there's a lot more that this city offers when we're talking about a pension and health care um and all the other benefits that come here, so it's not just that single dollar.

Um these are you know long life sustaining careers and and and with decent retirement long term.

So I I think as an entire city, no matter if it's in DP or not, I think that's something that should be promoted more.

And Commissioner, who would be that point person to connect with if we wanted to, you know, hear more about, oh, we're partnering with these individuals or these these are the programs that we're running.

Who would be sure?

I mean, you could tug myself or even Jackie into ER, because I mean there's a partnership here.

It's not like one of us works alone.

Got it.

And then um, I think it flew out of um that the last thing I just wanted to say is that um will there be a point where because I know every year you all are asked to cut, cut, cut, cut.

Will there ever be a because you know uh DNS is also another big one that for me that it's just like we have to grow it and not cut it because of the needs um that our residents um are having.

Will there ever be a point where you're just like I just we we can't continue to cut anymore?

I mean those discussions go on every time and during budget.

I mean it's a this is gonna sound this is a positive and negative statement all at once.

Because the city has come more fee-based, there is a bottom end.

So as we have a snow and ice fee, we have a street lighting fee, we have wheel tax fees, so all these numbers, you can't go below that cut.

So there is a bottom end.

We're not there yet, so there, you know, as we kind of go through tougher budgets, but there is a bottom.

I mean, you know, I I know our residents do not like all these extra charges on, you know, their municipal bill.

We call it municipal and not Waterville, even though it's tied to that.

And those charges are there just to sustain services.

And that's because you know, we do not get funding for the city like we should.

So there is a bottom.

So it's not like we will go down to zero by any means.

Yeah, and uh, and I'm glad that you said that because you know, one of the things that our residents are saying is yes, I'm paying all of this, and I feel like I'm not getting all of it, right?

I I pay the light fee.

My light, you know, I know Alder Woman Pratt knows that all too well.

Oh my gosh, let's not get into that.

For another time.

Um, but they they talk about it, and um I want to make sure that if we're going to charge them, like there has to come a point where we say we're gonna have to figure workforce, budget, we're gonna have to figure it out because we can't continue feeing our people, charging them all these fees, and they're just not getting the just the quality or even close to the quality of services that we're charging them for.

So again, I know that's a that's an issue that we're gonna have to figure out how to address, but we're gonna have to figure out how to address it because our constituents are they're at us and they are they are just not happy, you know, because they're being charged so much, and we're gonna have to increase charges again, right?

To keep up with just you know what you know, work for just to keep up with everything, we're gonna have to continue to raise fees, and I cannot keep saying, yeah, we're gonna raise fees, but the quality of services diminishes.

So I hope that's something that we can work really hard on as a body, as an administration, to figure out what that looks like and how we address it.

Thank you so much, Madam Chair.

Madam Chair.

Audible Montana.

Thank you so much.

Um I I do want to start with thank you, because uh sounds like you guys are working pretty hard to figure out how to solve this issue and you're working together.

So I really appreciate that.

Um but just again, a piggyback off of uh Alder Woman Moore, with this employment, it it sounds hopeful when you say we have 270 openings, is that what you said?

Um and I I do thank you for uh coming out when we had the um the uh youth conference uh for the uh trades.

Um because it then they get really excited because they think of the possibility of gaining employment.

Uh and then we try to talk it up about like um commissioner was just saying, all of the additions that you get um in addition to pay, right?

Uh but then they come back and they say, but it takes too long.

So have we done anything to shrink the process for employment because that's that's that discouraging factor from you know getting them to apply.

So my ask of them was apply now, and I I don't even know if they can really, but juniors and seniors, at what point can they apply?

So by the time they graduate, they can get into they they hopefully be employed.

Yeah.

Before we go to uh I do have I am working on something where we especially in DPW particular, to where we can like streamline like their hiring process a little bit more faster.

Because I I I see their pain, I hear their paying not only from the commissioner and everything like that.

So he's gonna answer more about it, but uh, and let's work together.

I do think it's a partnership between whatever rules and regulations are, you know, from you know the council, the mayor, department heads, um and I I appreciate Oliver Chambers.

I mean, we have to figure out a way to get people in faster because you know, as we hire, we do a little lose a lot of top candidates at the beginning because we wait so long because people aren't gonna wait once for positions.

Yeah, um so you know, there's been ongoing discussions, and I I I think there continues to be.

I mean, we do have civil service rules that we have have to abide by by all means.

Um but I think there's a pathway.

I think you know, obviously uh Director Carter who is in there is open to a lot of these ideas and and exploring what this looks like.

So I don't want to speak for Department of Board relations, but uh we want to work together and be partners in this to to help.

And so if they start as a senior in in in high school, can it is it possible that we can I I don't know.

I I don't have the answer for you right here, because I don't know.

I don't know all the rules and guidelines from what uh relations I'd rather leave that to the What is something that I'd like to to work with you on because I mean you you you have a group of people who are applying and I don't want to just give them hope because we say 270 jobs and they're like, oh great, I'm gonna go and apply.

And then they're waiting one and two years to get employed.

So yeah.

So, one or two years.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, just to comment a little bit uh and agree with everything the commissioner just said.

Uh I think there's a differentiation between the hiring process that we're working collaboratively to improve as part of the city and maybe the requirements to actually qualify for some of the rights positions, right?

And those are ones that when we're posting the positions, actually DR is very intensive in talking with us about is that minimum requirement actually necessary?

Do we need that level to perform the job?

Okay.

And so that's probably more of a conversation around training programs, making sure there's access and getting people ready for be meeting the minimum requirements for the jobs.

Um and again, it's as you know it depends on the position, right?

I mean, a carpenter, there's a certain standard before you become a carpenter.

There's a certain standard before you become an electrician, a certain number of hours that are required, and that's not something the city sets.

Right.

That's you know, that's an industry standard.

So those are the complexities that are um can impact an individual just as you talked about, but are different, not maybe necessarily uh necessarily than the things we're talking about improving.

With the DR.

Yeah, there's so many branches here.

Right.

Well, I think it's definitely something that we need to work together on.

So I appreciate that.

Thank you.

As you developed it, I would love to be a part of that conversation um as well, because um, I know it's different, but just like fire and police have those opportunities through um the cadet program and through the other programs that um I think as early as 17 uh young people can have a pathway um into those departments um if there's a way that we can uh do something similar on public works um that could be extremely um uh beneficial and work with the trades who can do that that could be um beneficial and I know it's other it's internships and stuff that you all have tried um and have had some success with um in the past so it might be a mishmash of changing some rules here that we legally can and then um creating more of that internish um type situation that helps lead to permanency um and employment um as well um because that's not just for young people it's for people in general um but for all people but um I do if there are no other flooding questions I would say thank you to Audible and bring it full circle and make sure that we didn't talk about flooding and that we um to ask that maybe we you like like Alderman Chambers requested that this remains open and that maybe when we hear it again that we can get a report out from the task force.

Yeah, um that task force.

I hope you heard today some of the suggestions about additional members um that folks thought um should be a part of uh that conversation.

Um if there are not already, I would just suggest um somebody from the state as well, um, just because some of the recommendations may require some assistance from them.

Um and that you all put in a report back time for um to council and the public, and that you find a way to either stream tape or televise um those meetings too, because I do think the public is deeply interested in not just the results but also the conversation along the way.

Um and also for the department, if you have not, and for members, if you have not read the e-comments, I encourage you to.

And there may be some that departmentally you could respond to as well.

Um and there's some very specific suggestions that may be beneficial from residents directly um as well.

Um also another one more earlier was talking about her love of the adopt a great program.

There's huge things, right?

Like we need more basins, we need to do this, and it that 100 million here, 50 million there.

But there are also little small things that will help somewhere along the way.

And the clean and the adopt a great program is one of those.

But I also think you have to think about how to marry the small things that you could do in those hot spot areas and those whatever wet, you know, we're cleaning the great ain't gonna solve the whole thing, but it might be worth developing not only a strategy to promote the program, but to specifically promote the clean a great thing to be adopted by folks in some of those areas that you know it can make at least some difference um right away.

So it's not just a general, hey, no, it's like these areas right here, y'all should adopt these because it can make a difference.

Um that kind of thing.

Um so I just would encourage um thought on the macro level, of course, but also that micro level, um, so that we can begin to see some change in this um sooner.

Just one more point, Madam Chair.

Are you gonna come back to committee with this bagging plan and the details of the bagging plan?

Yes, we actually can.

What you're gonna do about non-compliance?

We can expect massive non-compliance.

Especially in neighborhoods dominated by renters.

Yeah, if we can come back absolutely.

Yeah, completely.

Um Madam Chair.

Completely can I just be added as a co-sponsor, please?

Um the record reflect on Tyler be added.

And I think uh one of the residents, one of my residents, um Dr.

OV actually mentioned it after one of the flooding, and that's about the when there is new construction, when there is development, the amount of um whatever we make them retain um that that could be uh increased, and that might help um as well.

One of y'all mentioned it uh briefly earlier.

Yep.

Um I would love to have more conversation about that, because that's something if that is if that would help, that's something I think legislative we could just do.

Right.

Um more question.

Let's talk more about that.

I'll skip you something with you about that whole what you put together.

Yep.

One more point.

That's fine.

There is, and this is not generally used in Milwaukee, but some cities do have back.

Correct?

That you can install on the sewer lateral from your home.

These are used in Milwaukee.

They are used.

Um Kurt, if you want to describe the specifics for the critical backwater, yeah.

So for uh areas that are we call it our plus four area, but there are areas that are within where the basement elevation is within four feet of say standard lake level, or the basement is not sufficiently elevated above the microphone, please.

Oh, I'm sorry.

So focus on the phone over there.

Yeah, yeah, that's that that's that phone call is good system.

Is that by code that they're required to have the backflower?

I believe it is a strong recommendation that they should have the backflow preventers.

So that's something that could be retrofitted in many neighborhoods like Bayview in the areas that repeatedly flood, whether it's Lincoln Creek, whether it's the Bayview Streets that all the woman Demetrivers was describing.

I mean, that could be offered as a remedy, correct?

It would it requires excavation because it's put basically you gotta go down where the lateral is, right?

Correct.

Yeah, it is not a cheap solution.

Uh whether it's done inside the home, outside the home, uh there are definitely impacts financially, but I think that is definitely one of those items that the flooding task force will look at in terms of the specifics will work locally and regionally they will work to a point.

They won't protect you from the water you're generating on your own property.

But that's clean water typically.

Hopefully, yes.

They call that gray water.

Sure, but if you're functioning your toilet, for example, correct, right?

And off through your foundation.

Yeah, correct.

It's not sewage as a rule.

Correct.

It could be.

I mean, if if the backflow preventer is engaged because you know sewer levels are up and you run a load of laundry, shower, plus toilet to develop some program where we we offer homeowners that assistance.

I mean, when we go in and replace their lead lateral, water service lateral.

Why aren't we dealing with the sewer laterals?

Practical matter, you're you're usually within feet of the sewer lateral when you're dealing with uh what what lead service line, right?

There are some instances where we are doing that, uh working with MSD on uh locations where we've identified defective laterals.

Um as a matter of policy, we have not you're right.

There's no mandate to put in backflow preventers.

Uh we don't have a mechanism to fund backflow preventers at this point.

Like I said, and there are some potential downsides for the case.

For people watching, what what's what would be the typical cost range for the installation of a backflow preventer valve?

A lot less than a failed foundation, I suspect, but it would be in the thousands of dollars.

It would definitely be in the thousands of dollars.

Uh it would really matter on the layout of the foundation drains, your floor drain, uh whether you have a palmer drip valve or a uh sump pump, um all of that combined and separated.

There's all sorts of variables that would impact that construction.

Very good.

Um thank you all.

And Alderman Brower would move to hold um to the call um of the chair.

Um it is gonna request it and we take items uh what is it?

19 members 19 out of order.

We'll honor um that request.

Um objections to order.

Um so we'll honor the request of um item 19, follow two.

Item six zero.

I don't know, it's high question.

19 and 12 seem pretty similar.

Thank you.

That's what I was gonna say.

And I yeah, I don't know if we should put those together base or three and fifth two.

Oh, 19 and 12.

Yeah, we're planning on date they have elapsed from it.

Road repairs in the weekends.

Yeah, call them together.

Yeah, let's call them again.

Okay.

Well, uh, okay.

We're calling up item 19, uh um item 26, 26023.

Communication from the Department of Public Works regarding Pi Hole patching requests and responses, including location, time frame, and historical data sponsored by all the women more.

Uh file number two five, two, two, two, three, communication on department of public works relating to the possibility of directing city crews to conduct road repairs um on weekends, which is sponsored by Art De Women Pratt, um and Arderman Chambers.

Are there women more?

Did you want to speak?

Yes, thank you so much, Madam Chair and um committee members as well.

Um as many of you know, we have uh got start uh already gotten the calls, the emails, the text messages, the inboxes around the potholes.

And um I know that this has been a really challenging winter, uh, and it has done the weather has done a number on our roads.

Um each of us that have driven through the city have had challenges driving through the city because there's been so many um potholes.

Uh I want um I want to just really sidebar, throw out that, you know, the brewers um paid for a really beautiful piece of equipment uh that we actually need more of um that would make filling potholes um a lot more efficient.

Um and you know, just over time I think it's more advantageous for us to use that method compared to you know what we've done in the past.

Um, but there's a there's an extremely high number um of potholes that we have seen throughout the city.

So I wanted the department because you know, I want to uh you know, I wanted to use the moment as an opportunity um to be really just transparent with our constituents to let them know that hey, we understand that this is an issue, and you know, here's what the department plans are in order to address this.

Um so I'll kick it back to the de or however it is, madam chair.

I just want to kick it back to the department to sort of give us um, you know, talk about yes, you know, hey, this is where we are, but sort of the plan on how we plan to address the issue.

And before you go to that, uh since we pull them out together, man pride, is there anything you wanted to add or um yeah, I I pretty much agree with everything she's saying.

Really, I put this file forward uh because we put this file forward because uh because we uh just trying to look at expanding um the time in which we're feeling so moving it to weekends, moving it earlier.

I've seen that in other cities that they're doing, they've been successful with um being more aggressive with how they're filling potholes.

I appreciate all the work that street maintenance is doing.

I've done a ride along with street maintenance to to fill potholes.

I know how difficult and uh grueling that work is, have lots of people working D PW street maintenance who live in my district.

Um, but this issue is causing, I mean, I'm replacing a control arm on a vehicle.

I mean, so like these are huge issues.

Um, and lots of people uh talking about the the concern over vehicle issues, but even um how bikers fear for their safety because of the potholes.

Um and I mean sometimes even walking if you are not looking.

So um just addressing that and being more aggressive with our strategy of filling them.

Um as we say earlier, people are paying for a service, and then they often feel like they aren't getting it.

And one of those things are uh is the street.

Yeah, and Madam Chair.

Yep, and to that point.

Um, and to that point, again, uh echo the same sentiments.

Um, but I I'll take it a step further.

Um, you know, I I know that when we have our snow and ice, um, you know, as we spoke about earlier, we're all hands on deck.

And you know, I know that the processors were, you know, we get a call, um, you know, we get a call or we get a you know, a ticket in for it, and then we'll go and and fill it.

Um I I need us to be a little bit more proactive on that.

I I don't want to wait for tickets to be called because let's let's face it, there are more powerholes than there are people making requests.

And I think that you know, I see our DPW trucks and I really appreciate their hard work as everyone mentioned um I'm in that same group.

Um, but they drive through the city every day, go on the tickets and stuff.

I know they see potholes that need to be filled that probably was not a ticket on there.

So I need I think we just need to be a little bit more proactive.

And you know, I I hate being on the side of asking it's like we're just squeezing out more and more time and effort and everything of that nature, but again, I I I gotta take the all hands on deck approach with this and and we just need a little bit more to like just be more vigilant, uh vigilant and seeing those potholes.

If we see it, take a picture of it, make a note of it where they can go at the end of the day, put in the database, boom, these where I see potholes at.

And if it cross-reference where a ticket is already there, fine.

If not, you know, we have you know records on that because we're gonna see a spike.

We're gonna see a huge uptick in claims that will be coming into this body in judiciary and legislation commission committee about potholes, about tires, control arms, etc.

etc.

Coming to try to get, you know, money from the city on these potholes.

And I think if we're taking the aggressive approach to, you know, neutralize this, I think we'll be in a better position to fight that because it's gonna get to a point where we're not gonna be able to fight it.

We're gonna be like, we're green.

I mean well, I'm sure on that point.

Uh I think we are gonna end up paying these claims.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Or hundreds of thousands of dollars because they will establish negligence.

Because we knowing we know there's a problem.

The problem is foreseeable.

And now we're well past our what three-day standard or four-day standard to repair it.

So we are negligent.

So negligent.

So I I don't think I we want to admit negligence at this point.

Case by case.

Thank you.

But citizens are watching this and they are gonna think that when they file it, that's what's the problem.

I'm not advocating that we are negative.

And legally, you have to prove that we knew of the specific paho that injured your tire, and you may not be able to prove that.

General issue, yes, we know about it.

But legally, if you if you try to sue us, you gotta put we know about that specific one there.

To my point, to my point on that, to my point where you know, I think, you know, if we got trucks out there, whether that's forestry, whether that's road maintenance, whether that is waterworks, I don't care who it is.

They got a yellow truck with a yellow vest and uh a hard hat or anything like that.

If they see it, if they see something, say something.

Just like we tell, you know, victims, if they see something, say something.

Um far as that, because that can help us out in the long run.

And that's the reason why, you know, Auto Woman Pratt and I um authored this file um far as doing this, because we do need the same intensity as we do with snow and ice control on these paholes so we can write this ship.

Sure.

And and I know you guys um are ready to talk about women more.

You had something I say.

No, I y yes, please.

Thank you so much.

I just wanted to correlate the um with uh Alder Woman um Pratt's um file in regards to the weekend, just how the ramifications of that on our workers, because we're stretching a small group of people to work longer hours.

I just you know, we have all these vacancies.

I just want to make sure that we even have the capacity for you to talk a little bit about the capacity to even do that.

Sure.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Go ahead.

Thank you, Chairwoman, members of the committee and and and other authors.

Um Kevin Mews, City Engineer, Department of Public Works.

Um with me is Tom Wangren, uh, our street maintenance manager, street services manager and uh infrastructure services.

Um so we'll I think start with just talking about where we are.

I did want to I prefer not to start with disagreeing with any elders when I'm in the conversation, but I just want to note where we are right now.

Um we definitely want elders, our staff, members of the public to report potholes they see.

But the issue right now is not reporting potholes.

We have way more service requests at this time than we've ever had in any year on record.

So it is not reporting the potholes that is the issue.

It is our staff capacity to address the potholes.

And so that uh I just want to emphasize that.

And I'll talk a little bit about the data.

Um when time's right, we'll try to share the screen here as well to show a chart that we've got.

So um so past six years, so 2020 through 2025 on April 30th, roughly end of April.

Um, our average is four about 4500, 4600 service requests for potholes being filled.

Right now, end of April, we are at almost 11,000 service requests for potholes being filled.

Um our record year, our two record years uh were 2014 and 2019.

Those years we were between 6500 and 8400 pothole service requests at the end of April.

So we are on pace for a record year.

Um we ended those two years at around 16,000, 17,000 requests.

So, you know, we don't know what the rest of the year is gonna take because this is it's very weather dependent, but certainly it looks like we're on pace for it to to break the 2014 record of 16,800 requests.

Um the uh as we alluded to earlier, staffing levels and street maintenance, the number of funded positions is quite a bit lower than it was even in 2019.

So that's another challenge we have.

Um what we're trying to do, and there were communication that went out to the Aldermanic offices on Friday evening last week for members of the public who are listening, though.

Um, we are prioritizing uh two types of potholes right now.

One's on high volume, high traffic streets, so our major arterials.

Um two reasons to do that.

One that is the more the ones that are more likely to be impacting more residents, right?

Especially those driving and biking, as we've already talked about.

Two, that allows us to be very efficient with our crews and grouping those requests and kind of marching in order down the street.

And so we're focusing on those.

We are also focusing on no matter what kind of street it is.

If there's information, the service request or a photo, we love a photo that shows a very deep pothole, we will prioritize that as well and try to get to that as quickly as possible.

Response times, even on those are at about a week right now.

Minor arterials, uh so it's still important streets, but slightly less.

We're looking more like two weeks.

And residentials, we don't have a time frame right now.

Um so what are we what are we doing?

Um so we are working overtime.

We are working Saturdays.

Um so right now our staff are working 12 hour uh the so eight hours the standard shift, an additional four hours every weekday.

That's voluntary overtime that our staff are volunteering for.

Um we also have staff coming from sanitation.

Um sewers is assisting as well.

Um so there's volunteers coming from other parts of DPW to it to enhance our crews.

Um we are right now also last Saturday was our first Saturday shift.

So last Saturday we did an eight-hour overtime shift on Saturday.

Um so we will expect to continue to do that as well.

That's not necessarily limited by our staff's desire to volunteer for this overtime.

It's limited by the availability of the asphalt.

Um so the asphalt plants that we have access to the hot mix asphalt from are not open on Sundays.

So that is why we're not offering the opportunity to work on Sundays.

Um this past Saturday was the first Saturday we could get hot mix asphalt.

Um so that's why that that happened.

Um, I don't know if you want to try to share screen here to show the show the chart.

I mean, what's essentially going on here, um, and we'll we can email out this chart as well uh afterwards.

Um what's essentially going on is that we're seeing a combination of pretty nasty weather factors.

Um so we had um I guess I'll just explain this and hopefully I know it's it's a little detailed.

You always try to remove the detail but still provide what you need, so I apologize.

So there's kind of a reddish line, you know, heading heading uh left to right and heading quite up on the right.

That reddish line is the number of service requests.

Um the blue line is uh the number of requests fulfilled in a in a running total.

This starts in November 1st and it goes up to basically uh uh just a couple days ago.

Um what we saw is you know, through November 1st until the end of the uh the end of 2025 and early uh uh 2026, a pretty typical, we were able to meet the requests right as they're coming in.

We're keeping pace.

Um we had our first major thaw of the year in January 8th and 9th, uh reached the upper 50s, as it usually does, that bumped up the requests a little bit towards 40 requests a day.

Um again, a reasonable total, very typical for this time of year uh to reach that.

Um but then in March uh and really in April, things started to accelerate.

So on March 9th, we had a high of 72.

Um that was followed by our late snowfall, that was again timed with the spring leaf collection, um uh March 15th through 17th.

So we had rain, snow, freezing rain, and a freeze back, and then a thaw right afterwards.

Um and and if for those of you who have had to listen to me talk about potholes before, you'll know that that is uh basically the always the start of the problems uh for potholes.

Um and so you can see uh in that line on uh it's right above where it says 321 26, but it's it's March uh 21st there.

You can see that it begins to accelerate up to 200 requests a day after that.

We first got access to hot mix on April 6th.

The reason we care about hot mix is that is a more permanent solution, it's a better solution.

There are some potholes that we do not like to fill with cold patch, which is what we have available uh during periods when we don't have hot mix because we know it's not going to stick to that particular type of pothole.

Um so that uh uh we we've we want that hot mix available, it makes us more efficient and effective.

However, this year um our supply was intermittent.

So we didn't really even hour to hour, we didn't know whether or not we were gonna have hot mix available and working with our our providers.

Um so that was already pretty bad.

That was that was uh, you know, we were on pace for a pretty accelerated year.

Um, and then the the rain events that we just talked about in item five really kicked things into high gear.

Um we saw some very interesting pavement failures, and certainly potholes um showing up across the city up towards an average of 500 requests per day in the week immediately after uh that the heavy rainfall events.

Um what we think is going on is that the ground was so saturated, as as Mr.

Schaefer from MMSD mentioned, the ground was so saturated that the additional rainwater on top that three to seven inches, depending on where you were, um, was actually meeting water that was pushing up from below on the road, and so the the water was already pressurizing on underneath the pavement, and then that heavy rainfall was able to lift and move chunks of pavement away.

So we saw, in particular, on roads that have a concrete base with an asphalt overlay, some delamination between those two layers as the water got in between, and that pushed pieces of the pavement away.

Um right after the storm event, there was actually some very dramatic versions of that, um, which are kind of away from this pothole discussion.

Um, but pleasant street right by the river uh in district six had one of these.

Uh, there was one I think it's in district ten over on 39th in St.

Paul.

Um this seemed to be where hills and a lot of water pointed in particular actually moved the pavement, but that's kind of an aside.

Um, but that is a dramatic example of what was going on elsewhere where it wasn't as hilly, um, where where again the the water just really beat on the pavement.

The good news is that the past couple days requests have leveled off a bit.

We did have a press event with Alderwoman Moore and the mayor yesterday and the brewers that always increases requests again, so we'll see a little surge um as the public gets aware, more members of the public get reminded or or become aware of how they can report potholes.

Um but at this point we're trying to accelerate that blue line with these overtime works to try to begin to catch up.

But it is it's an ugly situation right now.

Um trying to figure what else.

Anything you wanted to add, Tom.

Yeah, uh Tom Wangren, street services manager, uh DVW.

Uh just add a bit more context to the uh to the weather as as we see it on the chart there and what that means for our staff.

So uh if you look in the beginning of January, first major thaw, um we we sensed it immediately with the request coming in.

We um we wanted to react by immediately um implementing overtime, which is something we try not to do, obviously, with cold mixed asphalt.

Uh with no other choice at hand though, that's uh basically what we were looking at.

Um shortly after that was uh a pre-prolonged snow event, um, of which you know uh of my staff uh anywhere from 20 to 30 uh were working to salt and plow for that event.

Um on top of that um with certain conditions during the day, we we simply can't with the staff we have um patch uh if if there's active snow or if there's you know slush field potholes.

So um we basically we're waiting on the starting line to even implement cold mix overtime until the end of January because or beginning of February because there's a deep freeze.

And um we were we were going through um considerations for staff even um being outside in the daytime first shift.

So uh these are all difficulties that kind of double themselves for us.

Um the uh into March, you know, we were able to get our you could see the um blue line try to catch up there where we were starting to do weekday overtime and even weekend, Saturday overtime with cold mix.

Um and obviously now we're in a position where um we've been we've been kind of waiting on the starting block for a lot of these things just because number one weather controls it, material availability controls it.

Uh and then DPW um other I don't want to say competing, but other um emergency related priorities are part of it.

Um sewer maintenance had their floods uh their flood control last week or two weeks ago, and my staff played a heavy part in working that with them, preparing for it during the day.

Kevin had mentioned the pavement failures that had arisen as a result of that.

We personally had myself and uh district managers, supervisors running around in the field because we knew another one was coming on Friday night, and we knew that the the pavement that had been opened up as a result of the prior storm uh was even more uh vulnerable for further damage.

So we were going site to site, number one cleaning, cleaning catch basins, all the while not patching potholes because there are you know emergency demands for us.

So um just want to illustrate how this can sometimes double and triple over.

I know there were moments this winter where it seemed like an abnormal winter, but overall it may not have flagged to anybody as something very extreme.

But the um the sequence of events that are shown on this are we're almost designed to make it a very, very difficult pothole season.

And that's why we're seeing the numbers we are right now.

Um further to our plans.

We know we can't just sit back and say our staff is limited with this is all we can do.

That I don't accept that as the answer either.

Yeah.

Um ahead of this communication file, we even uh weeks prior, we were uh be getting coordination to um really enhance our overtime.

Uh we're looking at probably a capacity, I don't want to limit it, but a capacity of up to 18 crews that would that would be able to work over time.

And for context, we have 12 crews that work uh first shift.

So um we're we're we're looking at Saturday as our first uh step of this in enhanced over time.

We're scheduling it as we speak, so the numbers, you know, we'll we'll be able to confirm those and report those.

But um we expect this to be an ongoing effort.

Uh not short by any means, but we're gonna keep fighting and we're gonna put all the resources we can to it.

What with the changes that you've uh spoken of, uh how do you uh anticipate it impacting uh what now is the seven day and what to two weeks?

Um you know uh uh it's difficult to commit to anything.

You know, we we know it's gonna bend the curve though, right?

It's gonna do better.

Um, you know, as Tom mentioned, we started over time earlier this year than we normally do.

Um one of the outputs of that is uh compared to our um sorry six-year average for the end of April is about 3600 requests resolved at the end of April.

Right now we're at 4200.

So we are doing better than we typically do on resolving requests with the overtime we've already staffed.

So we expect that'll further accelerate so that gap beyond our typical capacity will will increase, which is good.

Um and so I would I would ask maybe for a week or two to see how our progress is, and then we can update um and see what what that means to us.

And we also have to watch what the red line does, what the request line does as well over the next couple weeks.

So one last question before Bomber.

If if if money weren't um more the object, what would you in a perfect world, what would you do?

Um to be more efficient with these with the uh I I think so uh it would be the whole staffing and equipment apparatus, right?

So you would you would have more staff regularly as part of street maintenance, you would have um more equipment, and you know, we struggle with equipment across the city, right?

And so we we have a significant backlog, you have more equipment that's more reliable.

We did have an operation that was quite a bit larger um you know in decades past, and so that would be something that we could look to.

Um we are making investments in technology.

Uh the Alder Woman mentioned um the piece of equipment that the brewers uh uh contributed to uh which will make us more efficient.

It will also allow us to deliver deliver a better and more long-lasting product.

Um we are to that equipment.

Uh about 50,000.

They paid all of it?

Uh the brewers paid about half.

Million dollar franchise, billion dollar franchise was able to come up with 25,000 dollars.

How generative?

Well, it's they didn't have to do that at all.

So uh maybe they can challenge some of the other companies to do this.

Yeah.

Oh, wait, I'm sorry.

So the equipment was 50,000?

Yeah.

Oh, that's not what was shared with me.

Okay, so and they only covered half?

Well, so the intent was uh sorry, I didn't interrupt you.

Okay, yeah.

So that was a choice on our end.

So the brewers, the brewers came forward with a contribution, wanted to talk collaboratively about what they could do to help.

And once we went through the process of identifying the best way to use that money, we determined this was the most efficient use and just recognized that yes, that meant that it was coming out of DPW's equipment budget to to add that additional piece.

So it's not like it's okay.

They said we'll give you half.

Not enough.

They came forward with a contribution and we tried to determine the most effective way to use that contribution.

Okay, so what you just said about more equipment, more staff.

Um beyond this file here today.

I would love for you to like put something on paper for um what that could look like.

Okay.

And the price tag attacks.

Okay.

All right.

I'm sorry, what it was it uh Ottoman bomb, you had um a question?

Yes.

What's the possibility of hiring contractors?

Or maybe paying some of the other municipalities to come in and do our work.

I'm serious because they seem to have no problem.

Shorewood streets don't have these problems, Tulsa Streets don't have these problems.

West Dallas streets don't seem to have these problems.

Apparently we have streets that are prone to all these difficulties, and they seem to have no major issues.

So why why don't we so maybe maybe they can use the revenue?

So I would I guess I would disagree uh that their streets don't have problems.

I think what you're observing there, Alderman is 30 to 40 years of underinvesting in streets, right?

And so um and we had that conversation at public works uh last year, and so it's not so much that they don't have limitations on filling their potholes, it's they have fewer because their streets are in better repair.

Um that's the big picture behind all of this is our streets are in poor repair.

What's the plan of this administration going forward so we catch up with the suburbs?

Um that would require um right now we spend probably uh 15 to 18 million a year on our local road network.

Um we had talked about this last year, that would require probably something in the neighborhood of sixty to eighty million a year.

Um and so it's a question of the city's capital budget resources, or as uh Alderman Bergelis said, because he was the sponsor of that file, the state um and and the state's interest in helping local governments across the state with tackling this problem.

Um so the you know that the overall goal for the capital budget, and I'm gonna try to stop quickly here because I'm not the budget office, but the overall goal for the capital budget is about 116 million uh over the past couple years.

If we spend 80 million of that on streets, uh that means we don't do much else.

Um and so it is it's a question of the overall fiscal resources available to the city.

Um and if we were to take out you know bond more, that means the interest payments grow uh over time.

So the administration's position is nothing we can do about it, this will continue the way it is.

Uh I think the well, I don't want to say the administration's position.

I think my perspective on this is the answer systemically to this problem is a change in how the state allocates resources to local governments.

Yeah.

Because that the administration position is this will just continue.

We'll continue to have a massive pothole problem and deteriorating roads indefinitely until state laws change or state but budget policies are changed.

Well, I I would say state law and state budget policies aren't immutable, right?

They look at them every two years and and and there's always a possibility of changes.

Um I think it isn't so much an administration position as it is a limitation of the city's fiscal resources and the tax revenue that the city has available to it.

Okay, I just want to make sure that that's the message that the public understands you work for the administration.

Mm-hmm.

Report to the mayor, serve at his pleasure.

Yep.

Important for the public to realize that this is the this is the reality going forward.

The fiscal reality of the city, yes.

And contractors.

Yeah, thank you.

Sorry for bringing forgetting that piece.

So we have explored contractors in the past, and and if Tom has anything to add, please jump in.

Um generally speaking, this is not work that contractors are interested in.

Um we were uh we were exploring options for that uh actually relatively recently, and we were not able to get to interest anyone in doing the work.

Um we actually just talked to a couple asphalt contractors in the area about this like two, three months ago, I think.

Uh is when you talked to them, Tom.

And so um uh and they were not interested in the work at that point.

Did they give reasons?

Uh it's so uh frankly, our staff work in harsher conditions than their staff do.

Um their staff work in controlled construction sites and ours work in traffic.

Um so they were not interested in that.

Um it is a difficult thing for them to cost out and and um even track on our end to make sure they're doing the work, right?

Because it's small uh uh sites all across the city.

Um honestly, in some ways it's not that different than the challenges we had with the scattered site sidewalk work, except for worse, because potholes uh appear ran, you know, not randomly, but they appear um unexpectedly and and the response time needs to be quick.

So it is it's a difficult thing.

I understand why the contractors aren't interested.

So I'm I think I answer up uh Ottoman.

But don't I just done a few things I'm I know you're piloting some of the Saturday stuff, but what's been the overall to date roughly participation from the workforce in the voluntary overtime?

To date, uh we get about 25 to 30 um crew members on a regular basis, any any given day.

Okay that can scatter between days, obviously with different being available.

How many total?

Uh 25 to 30 is out of how many total on the uh of our field staff that would be uh working that type uh about 80.

Okay 60 to 80.

Yeah, yeah.

Great.

Um and since we've we've opened up the sewer maintenance, we got a list of about 25 additional again that had to wait until after their emergency, so you know, that we were helping them with.

Um and then opening it up to operations.

Uh we we recently had a driver meeting with them for their pool of volunteers.

A lot of enthusiasm, and I was really really um it meant a lot to me that they uh were they were down for the cost that they really um wanted to do this passionately and and wanted to learn and wanted to you know meet new people and try something new.

So and the Saturday options, um we've already had a few of them you said, or we're planning on having one this Saturday or this previous Saturday was our first with hot mix.

Um we had been employing uh cold mix over time on Saturdays as needed, obviously.

Um but yeah.

And just to talk on the question of the the hot mix and the asphalt, um, because that's a a huge thing.

Uh to my understanding, we're using a contractor up in um Butler, right?

Or near nearby their Hampton on Hampton.

We use a contractor there.

Yes.

Okay, for that.

Okay, and and we've in the past the city of Milwaukee had an asphalt plant.

Um and that was approximately where the Harley Museum is located right now.

And has there been I mean, do we I know it would cost a whole bunch of money, but I I would imagine I mean here's a problem we're encountering with using a private contract with this, right?

We they are not operating on Sundays.

You know, the the contractor, I mean, even despite our you know, say despite our offering them some money, like hey, we want to have our crews come there.

Like, so as two and I mean I can understand.

I mean, their their employees have families, our employees have families, like they cannot be working every single waking hour.

We don't want to go back to something like that.

But um is have we I know have we looked at uh point seriously about opening another of a city-run asphalt plant to be able to meet these needs, or is that just out of we don't have a site for it or something or um Yeah, that's yeah that's a great point, Alderman.

I think um actually so we've had very ad hoc discussions about what that would take, but I actually um with Alderwoman Cog's request, Chairwoman Cog's request around what would it look like if money was no object.

I actually think it would be good to explore that as part of that, so we could talk about the cost and and what it might happen or what it might take to make that happen.

Um the uh you already identified it.

Location is important, cost is important, our ability to reliably operate an asphalt plant is important and what it would take from a staffing level to do that, right?

Um but there are changes in technology that have occurred in the industry since we closed and the the city asphalt plant down uh uh you know near Sixthland Canal.

Um and so there are ways that it it could be done if the resources were were identified for it.

Um I I think to your one additional piece I wanted to add around our our con the plants that we procure asphalt from right now.

Um the other piece is that we are relatively small uh from the quantity that they're producing each day.

And so they're they're focused on the construction projects they're trying to uh provide for right exactly.

So it's so it is a um that would be the other thing to consider if we were to have our own plant is that it would be much smaller as well than then you know a commercial plant.

Uh you know, also it'd be bigger and we sailed out of the people.

I mean would the suburbs be interested in joining?

I mean, there uh I think that's that would be part of the conversation.

Yep.

That's an interesting idea.

Yep.

Thank you.

Uh to that point.

I know we're talking about the suburbs or anything like that.

I'm gonna just try to do something with the county since they are the same.

Uh we explore with Milwaukee County, since they have 19 municipalities and work with that.

Yeah, uh yeah, we could explore the same thing with the with the county.

Um so the county uh obviously has county owned roads that they maintain, they have many fewer miles than we do.

I think the probably the dominant or more.

Fewer.

Okay, fewer.

Yeah.

Um I I think the dominant um thing that they're probably patching on is actually the freeway system on behalf of the state.

Um the county maintains the freeways for the state, so that would be the piece I would have to check.

I don't know, Tom, if you're familiar with their operation for pothole patching.

Uh not as much.

Okay.

Yeah.

So but we can check into that.

If they buy from the that's what I'd have to check, yeah.

Yeah, we can talk with them.

We do talk with the county regularly about it.

We just haven't talked about this issue.

So Madam Chair.

Just really quick.

Um, you shared that we received access for the hot mix on April 6.

Is it um this contractor or not contractor, um the vendor that we receive our hot mix from, do they operate year-round?

No, they operate generally uh end of November, they shut down for the winter and generally open up early April.

Um I will say a lot of the difficulties when Kevin had mentioned hour to hour and day to day in terms of availability, uh they were there were weather-based difficulties in some somewhat with plant operations.

I'm sure not knowing the details, I'm sure there's always kind of a kick the rust off type operation just to get the the plant back up and running.

Um but I will say that our we've been in daily, we had been in daily contact with them as necessary, and they uh they were very communicative and they were very understanding, and in fact, um I believe did leverage a little bit extra to um open up last Saturday for us.

So obviously that's appreciated.

Perfect.

And Kevin, can you talk just a little bit about just so that our um um audience and our residents understand like the difference between the the piece of equipment that the brewers assisted us in purchasing compared to what we normally do?

Can you explain that for us, please?

Uh yeah, I can start and actually Tom would be more expert than I would on the thing.

Well, whoever Tom, but but yeah, so the the piece of equipment that we showcased yesterday is is a uh asphalt hot box.

Um and so it's a trailer uh that's attached to one of our trucks um that allows us to maintain the asphalt at us at a consistent temperature.

Um so what happens normally is when the asphalt's put into a bed to fill the potholes as they continue throughout the day, or they continue using that asphalt that cools over time, right?

And so as it cools, it becomes less malleable, becomes less easy to use for our staff, and and may not uh adhere as uniformly as well.

So this this piece of equipment will allow us to uh maintain the temperature, it can actually be used to maintain a temperature in quite a range between 32 degrees and 300 degrees.

Um we were just talking about this yesterday, so uh typically around 270 degrees is what we're aiming for in most conditions.

Um we do have to play with that depending on how hot the road is and the air uh as well.

Um so that's that's the main benefit.

Um it also has uh some features that allow our staff to not have to lift heavier things and put you know, put the asphalt at the right height, uh hold the equipment properly.

Um the tamping machine is you know is at the as easy to remove with a mini crane.

So there's other benefits as well for the safety uh of our staff that allow us to be more efficient too.

I don't know if Tom, if there's anything else that I missed.

Yeah, and actually it um it it also improves our quality of cold patch.

The cold patch material is the same material we we're using, but at the at the ideal temperature, you know, delivery that we'll get out of it, um it'll improve compaction, which is one of the obviously key things in pothole patching.

So um not only that, uh it also has uh a side benefit where it has a recycling feature.

So we'll be able to stockpile uh leftover hot mix asphalt in our yard throughout the year to a certain extent and um utilize that stockpile, put it into the uh we'll break it up to a certain you know size and uh place it into the hot box itself and leave it on overnight, and it'll uh the next morning um be just as you would expect normal hot mix from the plant.

So obviously, opportunities there where there's uh mild stretches in the winter where you know we would expect to take advantage of that and use this uh this piece of equipment.

So and ideally, how ideally how many pieces of this equipment would be beneficial for us to have?

I would start with three.

I would start with three.

I I um I could see more obviously being um beneficial, but uh I believe three is obviously a good starting point, yeah.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, madam chair.

Um Andre Man, what's more then?

What's the process from beginning to end?

Filling the pothole.

You need a lot of things.

You need a run along.

Right.

I have done it right along.

You would know that.

I think it's I think it's the neighborhood for them solving.

Hold on, hold on, hold on.

Wait, yeah, hold on.

Come on.

So, first of all, everybody watching did not go on that ride along.

That's correct.

Number one, that's true.

Yeah, number two, needs the metaglasses.

I need to make sure the ones that taught me how to fill potholes taught me the correct way.

So thank you.

So very simply, you you clean the pothole, you fill the pothole, and you tamp the pothole.

You tamp the material you placed down.

How do you and that can that can differ?

So we by default broom, we have we have staff also with leaf flowers.

Air compressor on the vehicle works very well as well.

Um we just like painting, you want to make sure that there's no debris.

We're not coating into anything that's not gonna stick.

Um if it's a deep enough pothole, you should be filling it in lifts where uh if say if it's six inches, you want to fill three inches, tamp that three inches.

Make sure that that compaction reaches all the way to the bottom corners of where you're filling.

You top it off, tamp it.

There's crews that will uh roll with their vehicles with their vehicle tire if they don't have heavier compaction equipment.

And um with this with the new hotbox, um we we've got the crane to lower a plate compactor, and that's where you'd use the plate compactor.

So if the pothole is not cleaned out and it's not tamped, how effective is that patch?

How uh when is it gonna it's gonna pop out how much sooner?

Hard to say, but it it will pop out sooner.

Okay.

I'm not gonna say the crew I was with did or did not do it properly.

Um, but I am.

So what is quality control like?

Are we just telling these crews this is how we do it, and we're just hoping that they do it the right way?

Um because my concern is the quality of the patch, not the not that we're patching.

I just think that I mean surface prep is everything, as you mentioned.

Um I don't I don't think a lot of our potholes are being prepped uh patched properly.

It's our concern as well, every every case of it.

Um we have supervisors that um we put on a schedule of actually working with that crew uh on schedule.

This is your requirement for this month, and you're gonna be with this crew, you're gonna you're gonna observe the way they're doing it.

And my opinion on that is if they're not doing it correctly under supervision, then how are they doing it without supervision?

So that I I believe is working in multiple ways where obviously it's a better connection and it's it's displaying what our expectations are.

Are you able to identify a patch that was not done properly after it's done?

Or I could most of them, yeah.

Okay.

Obviously, you can't account for what wasn't swept.

For sure.

Um the way that we have required our staff to follow up with the closed out service requests, they have to take a before photo that would show the pre-existing condition after the pothole is swept.

The after photo, obviously, we you just be assessing the compaction on that.

And it is fairly easy to see what's been compacted properly and what hasn't.

Um obviously the before photo, it was opening up a level of um oversight that you know I don't believe was as possible in the past because um you can't account for what's buried, so we have to you know find a way to quality control that.

Okay.

I've heard conflicting information.

Is sanitation required to report potholes?

Do they have that responsibility?

I I can't speak to a requirement.

What I can speak to uh is we have a regular stream of requests coming through sanitation management, and um our understanding is that it is coming from staff to that upper manager or to the area managers or whatever district managers in sanitation and and filed through as a service request over to my staff.

Okay.

Um reporting.

So we're asking uh people that live in Milwaukee traveling through Milwaukee to report these potholes.

So if they call or they go online, I mean when you're driving, it's difficult to get an exact address.

Are we able to um because I've you know communicated with you and and other uh DPW street staff members, and I'll just give a stretch, I'll give a you know the 3700 block of 90th Street, and they'll go patch it.

But the ones that are calling in and going online don't have that ability, and they get frustrated when they can't give an exact address, but they say, Hey, I know this street, this stretch needs to be addressed.

Are we able to change that online?

Uh how we uh taking the reports?

So what we would ask the public to do in that case is uh at least when you're looking at it through click for action or you're looking at it on the app.

Um so there's a couple fields towards the bottom that are actually required.

You're you you're required before you can submit to tell us is this a multi-block request and how many estimate how many potholes within the service request.

And so if it if they're doing a multi-block request, what is helpful is in the in the description area where you can write stuff in, give us some bounds.

So say this is on 37th Street between you know Minicky and right or something like that.

So that way it's uh it's something that we can uh then deploy our staff to address.

But a n but you do have to put an exact address in there because it will say that's the whole system works that way, yep, exactly.

So you're saying they should put their address in there, but in the comments, they can add stretches.

Yeah, we would ask that they put you know that they try to get the tag to an address that is within their requests, right?

But then in the comments they can put a bounce.

Yeah.

Got it.

My last point is and this is being done because Elizabeth and Avenue is being done, but you know, my frustration used to come in and we would fill it, you know, based on complaints, based on when the patch popped out.

Are we being preactive?

Um, is that the right word?

Proactive proactive with uh it didn't sound right.

Are we being proactive with what we know are problem areas and not waiting for complaints to come in?

Rather, maybe within someone's route, just going to that area and seeing like, hey, is that patch still good?

We are, and especially on streets like Lisbon prior to the construction.

Um I know perception obviously can seem a lot different.

There were just consistent requests, obviously, coming in for Lisbon.

We had that on a schedule.

Um there were just always requests coming in, so it it's may have seemed that it was a reactionary thing.

We had it on schedule.

So um with it uh specific to Lisbon, um there's a way that we have to balance our operation that is equitable for the city.

And we we could put our you know, three crews on Lisbon and and knock it out in a day and a half at the time.

It was a lot of work.

Um but we have to be aware of the other requests out there and the other hazards that other drivers are facing.

So we take a multi-stage approach on a street like that.

Uh first pass, we would just get the major hazards, get them out of the wheel path, anything in the parking lane, that'll be the next pass.

And then and then you do a more detailed pass after that, you know, maybe whether it was three days later or a week later, knowing that the hazards have been addressed.

So um, yeah, it's uh obviously um it's it's a difficult process, but we do have streets that we understand and expect issues on that we are proactive on number one inspecting and scheduling regularly.

Yeah.

Got it.

And final thing on the reporting.

You mentioned online.

Is there any way we can message or get the information that you just gave out to the 286 city number because they are telling people we can't take your complaint if you don't give us a specific address.

Okay, yeah, we can talk with the UCC about that.

Yep, okay.

Yeah, thank you.

Madam Chairman.

Okay, okay.

Honor Woman Taylor.

Oh, um, so since you're saying about the specific address, um, does taking those photos help you guys locate better?

Yes.

100%.

Both the photos and description.

And I say that acknowledging, you know, I obviously don't want anybody to operate their vehicle dangerously, you know.

Um if if they're in a my kind of habit is I just look at the nearest uh 100 block or you know, cros cross street that I pass and make a mental note and put the pin somewhere near it and give a bet a description later on either on my phone or computer if I'm submitting another type of service request that is.

Um so yeah, the the descriptions help.

The supervisors, uh the crew that that are being assigned these, they all have access to both the descriptions and the photos.

So the photos are a major help, especially during times like this.

So we're basing a lot of our priorities, obviously number one off a known hazards, but um we put a lot of stock in those um those request areas right now that have descriptions if there's vehicle damage, especially, but um and in photos.

So yeah, it does.

I do have to so I pull over, get out and wait, and then do a traffic slow and then take a picture.

Uh yeah, and then try to send that in.

Now, does it and I thought I heard you say like if it's um uh an area that might be a little more of a danger to residents, because I try to put in the description, these are craters.

I mean, meaning that they're deep and wide.

Yeah, and so that would take precedence because it is so wide that is creating more of a danger.

I think the photos most helpful.

Um but yes, we do pay attention to those types of descriptions when trying to identify what what to prioritize.

Okay, all right, thank you.

Counterwoman prior okay.

Yeah, my quote, uh I was just gonna add that if you're using click for action or if you're using an MKE mobile app rather, that the address where you are will pop up automatically.

So then you know where you are anyway, you know, like it automatically pop up.

Um and to ask if I report potholes constantly.

Um but I'm always concerned with when it gets to the multi-block, how many potholes?

Okay, so is the standard that like I'm not getting out to count all the potholes, but I'm like 30, you know, like a 10.

I don't know.

Like so do you fill them all?

Like, or do you if I put one, are you just going to fill one?

And that's what people have asked me.

Like, yeah, what do you put if I'm putting there are only three here and you come and really the whole street is uh needs it or it's nine, do you fill three?

Do you fill nine?

Do you look at the assess this entire street?

That's not a one-to-one, and it's it's not information, it's information accessible to our staff that it's assigned it, but it's not fronted to them.

They're not going one-to-one on it.

Uh any given location, they're expected to address the hazards within that spot.

And um that it was built in there as as sort of a scheduling uh, you know, uh the advantage so we're so we can have a better idea of what exactly to expect.

Um also trying to normalize the data a little bit because there can be one request for a singular pothole versus a request for 40 along two strip, you know, blocks.

So um it was you know, an attempt to kind of make things more efficient.

So any other questions.

All right.

Um West Morgan.

Just joking West Morland with move to uh uh place on file.

Are there any objections to their motion?

Hearing not so order item.

Yeah, both both file 12 and 19 on five.

Um objections to order item number six, file number two five two one zero six resolution approving a sixth amendment to lease agreement with cell call partnership DBA providing wireless for the placement of personal communications, thank you services, antennas and ancillary equipment at 5600 West Oklahoma Avenue Good morning.

Uh Jordan Shuttle from the City Attorney's Office uh before you in this file is a sixth amendment with Verizon regarding their equipment at 5600 West Oklahoma Avenue.

This amendment simply extends the lease term uh for Verizon out until 2052 and maintains a five percent rent escalator and clarifies as well what the rent is for Verizon moving forward and that's consistent with other deals.

It is, yes.

The rent hasn't changed uh from its current uh path, and it's consistent with what we expect.

Are there any questions about committee?

Hearing none, order woman Taylor would move adoption.

Are there any objections to that motion here and that?

So order item number seven, file number two five two one two eight resolution approving amendments to a lease agreement with T-Mobile Central LLC for the placement of personal communication services, antennas, and ancillary um equipment at the South Side Health Center at 1640 South 24th Street.

Good morning.

Jordan Shuttle from the City Attorney's Office before you is an eighth amendment with T Mobile for their equipment at 1640 South 24th Street.

This amendment simply allows C Mobile to go in and upgrade some of the equipment they currently have at the facility.

Any questions from committee?

Auto and bombing will move adoption.

Hearing no objections, so order item number eight, file number two five two two three one resolution authorizing an easement with Wisconsin Electric Power Company on City of Markey property at 5575 North 76th Street in the second automatic district.

Good morning.

Jordan Shuttle from the City Attorney's Office.

This is an easement for uh distribution easement with WEPCO regarding land in which MPS is currently uh developing a community center app.

The location is at the uh uh corner of 76 and Silver Spring.

Uh I from what I understand this this easement would allow uh We Energy's to uh lay down new uh facilities and uh be able to help uh uh service that community center better moving forward.

Madam Chair.

Automan Bauman.

What are they paying for this easement?

There is no fee attached to this easement.

Why is that?

Uh I think from from DCD's perspective, this is a piece of land that is benefiting MPS.

Uh there's the community center going in.

The focus is trying to help the development with the community center.

I think we need a lot of easement.

Why the easement isn't to MPS.

Sorry?

I guess because we hold MPS firm.

Yes, we own all.

Excuse me.

Sorry, spend a long three hours sitting in the back.

Um we own all of the land for MPS.

Um MPS, so if any conveyance of property interest occurs, the city has to be involved, and it's usually the party conveying that interest.

Uh any other questions for committee.

Uh Otterman Westmoreland will move adoption.

Well, I'll object.

Uh with one objection.

Um motion passes.

Um item number nine.

File number two five two one three nine, substitute resolution relative to acceptance and funding of the Wisconsin Coastal Management Program Grant for the Wisconsin Department of Administration.

The energy is gonna easily forget.

All right, um, order woman Tyler will move to how to the call of the chair.

Here, no objections, so order.

Um, five one seven eight nine in ordinance relating to sidewalk area dining permit fees.

Um sponsored by order woman Demetrich.

Art Woman Demetri Avich.

Thank you so much, uh woman uh chairwoman and committee here.

Um we have uh Mr.

Washington who's been absolutely helpful on the situation.

Um I'll keep it brief, but this is to change the fee for the sidewalk area dining permit.

Um, and I would prefer that he explains kind of what it was and what it will be, but I had a number of businesses um specifically along Kinickinick Avenue, and I'm sure maybe some of you all got these phone calls too.

There was a break in payments during COVID when we wanted everybody to go outside.

Um, and then when the bill came, um, it was larger than some had anticipated because they hadn't paid for it, and then there was an increase.

I think this is exactly the type of community we want to see where people are out and about, um, they're enjoying their sidewalks, their public spaces.

It it brings um, you know, community and it's important to small businesses.

Um, the one in question was Lulu's that had mentioned this to me, and then when we investigated it, we found what I believe a nice healthy compromise.

Um there is a cost, and I'll conclude here, and please correct me if I'm wrong.

There is an upfront cost to go out there and measure it and make sure that it's acceptable for people with different abilities and strollers and bikes.

What I'm concerned about is the renewal.

The renewal was still very costly.

So once you got that first assessment, the renewal I thought should be more affordable as a way to continue to help some of our small businesses that we know are still kind of challenged um in succeeding in the city for many reasons.

So with that, I offer this change and I hope you'll be able to support it.

But I would love to hear more from the department who's been great to work with.

James.

Yes, good afternoon, uh, Madam Chair and Alders, James Washington, Public Works Coordination Manager.

Um so as uh Alder Woman Dmitrievich mentioned, um, during COVID, we suspended um fees for our active streets for business program for sidewalk dining cafes and parklets.

So uh we suspended fees for five years, and in the 2024 um budget um um ordinance, we had those fees um reinstituted.

Um we also had those increase because um I mean compared to a lot of our pure cities, uh what we were in charge of were extremely low.

Um we had those increased.

Um because that increase became late in the 2024 season, as you're aware, budget um budget processes in October.

We didn't want to have that uh begin in 2025.

We wanted to give um applicants an opportunity um to get um basically get their fiscal affairs in order and that to you know surprise them and have to have a quick turnaround with those increased fees.

Um so that began in the 2026 season.

So this is when Alder Woman Demetrievich said that she was getting some pushback from some of her um businesses in her district.

Uh and with that, we understand uh sidewalk dining cafe permits were extremely cheap.

That was increased to one dollar a square foot, which um again compared to Pierce Cities is pretty cheap, but for a lot of um a lot of our applicants, those um increases were up to 500, 600, 700 percent.

So we can understand some of that um some of the blowback.

Um so um based on um Alder Woman Demetrievich's um advocacy, we're willing to reduce that two dollar a square foot that we initially um proposed to one dollar a square foot for applicants that are renewing their permits.

So so give me some like real numbers like for the a basic average size place that wanted to use um the outside dining, it was what for renewal, and this is making it what well it depends because it is by square foot, and it's difficult to say what average is.

Um I'll just take one at random.

So if you had a um if you had a 300 square foot outdoor dining uh facility, it was 75 dollars for the year.

So 300 um basically if it's um a dollar square foot, that's 300.

So it went from 75 dollars for the year to 300 square so that's a four-time increase.

And you say even at the 300, that was less than our national than our comparable people.

Well, just to give one example, the city of Madison, they charge $550 a square foot if you're near the um if you're near the concourse near the um near the college or near the capital, and it's three dollars a square foot elsewhere.

We don't differentiate on geography.

We do not.

Any other questions for committee?

Could I just add one more thing?

Is this still an increase?

It's just not as high of an increase than you had originally put forward.

Correct.

So basically the increase would be cut in half.

So if you had a 600% increase, it's still a 300% increase.

Any other questions from committee?

I'll say this.

I'm gonna support it because I know a lot of small businesses are struggling right now.

But I'll publicly say this and I will help the department hears this.

My hope would be though that you're still looking at future increases.

This is just um pushing back the the huge jump for people to have to take now.

You know what I'm saying?

Correct.

And I don't want is ten years from now, we still sit in here at a dollar.

You know what I mean?

Correct.

And that's what that was the reason for the increase in the first place.

But we we do understand that maybe the the sticker shock that some people had.

I'm sure.

Uh Ottoman um bro.

Yeah, thank you so much.

So where does the where does that fee income go when it's received?

It's my understanding goes to the general fund.

I would verify that.

And is this I mean, did we in the budget we anticipated two dollars a square foot?

Is this w I mean, are we like is this gonna result in a cut somewhere then?

Or are we talking just a few thousand dollars citywide?

Um, it's a relatively significant cut.

So based off of our 2020 impact four numbers, yeah.

If it was two dollars a square foot, that would have been about a hundred and one thousand dollars in revenue.

So that would basically be cut in half.

Okay.

Okay, yeah.

Are we immediately on the well I guess it will go into place after after this is passed?

Immediately a font.

Thank you.

And I just found that in the file too, the fiscal.

Yeah.

So no no and so you've already gotten some.

Applications that you've got to do.

Some applications, yeah.

Some applicants have applications have come in.

So the 101, the half of the 101, isn't that 100% accurate because you don't know how many already?

This is to give you an idea because these are 2024 applicants.

Sometimes, you know, year by year, you're not getting the exact same applicants.

Some people may opt to do so, may some they didn't before, may do so, or vice versa.

Memories, I I don't remember.

Yeah, and and then please finish your only questioning.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry, I'll just put myself in queue after you're done.

Not if it okay.

So the um, yeah, and I know I know for a fact there's at least one business um that has in district three that has declined to do sidewalk dining this year because of this fee.

Um so you know, we don't want we don't want to see that, but also I you know for the to put this stuff in context, I mean a commercial real estate lease will charge two dollars per square foot per month, at least.

I mean, then we are we are not charging that for income generating space.

And so I like I don't know.

I'm a I'm a little torn on this because I like you know, the I don't know, you know, the uh it is it is a a really big struggle, and I like if a business that is operating so much on the margins, like should that business be in business if the if this if this is their make or break point?

It's a sad state of our economy right now that that's where a lot of businesses are in, you know that but I I'm gonna vote yes for this because I think this will be I think this will be good for a lot of the sidewalk dining and it'll encourage some of that, and I think we should have that, and that you know helps helps what's going on.

But I you know the this whole I don't know, you know, I struggle, I struggle with this quite a bit because the whole concept of small businesses, I mean, those are some of our lowest wage employers.

You know, Target pays $15 an hour.

Some of our small businesses can't pay pay that, and it's because they don't have enough income.

And so this whole like I struggle with that.

I struggle with the with that, you know, conceptually and to a certain degree because it it's just I don't know.

You know, I I want I want our small business to do better.

We they can't jack up their prices like three times though, because then nobody will shop there.

So it's just a really a really sorry situation that we're in right now with with what our small businesses are facing and what we're forced to deal with here.

So I just uh but I'll I'll end up supporting this.

Thank you.

The only reason we're able to charge any fee is because we actually have costs that the fee is designed to cover, correct?

Technically speaking, yes.

This is more of this cover our cost, Steven, this one dollar of sewer food.

This will cover our costs, yes.

So this is more of an it's an occupancy.

You're expanding your business at the public.

Yes.

Do you have a uh listing that you could provide of um maybe the last couple of years of uh where people have um requested this um by district?

Um I certainly can't.

I actually have it in front of me.

Okay.

So I can um I can forward this to you.

Okay, thank you.

Madam Chair Mad.

So again, I think there's a big difference.

I when we had our talks, I I did not want to take away from the expert people that have to go out and do the measuring for all abilities.

This is for renewals.

And the businesses said to me, look, I've done it, I've done what I needed to do.

And I also have to give a reminder the way our climate is, you'd be lucky if this is three months of the year.

So, you know, um to compare it to a full annual square foot lease, um, I I think that's different.

And when they can expand in these probably their busiest months, I do think they can hire more people locally, and they're doubling their capacity at times.

This was a kind of a COVID thing.

That's why we didn't um allow those fees during COVID because we wanted to inspire it more.

So I I think this is a compromise, but I agree with the chairwoman very much so, especially as we serve on the budget committee that it should be a slow incline, but going from nothing in COVID then to a 700% increase left some people completely shocked.

So a slow incline, even letting people know in advance before they get the bill would be a bet better way to treat our local business partners that help make communities places that people want to buy houses and live.

So I appreciate it.

Um I know this is not um ideal to cut fees, but this one I think we could be a little bit uh more pragmatic and find a compromise.

Madam Chair.

I don't want more uh just to just piggybacking on the question that you asked previously.

So those individuals that have already submitted app at already submitted an application at the regular fee, are they going to get retro back?

Or it's like uh sorry, this it was instituted after you submitted your application or your renewal or whatever it is.

Yeah, that that's something we would have to verify if we're able to do.

Okay.

We know that the typical typically the sidewalk dining uh season starts uh March 15th.

So there were some people that already have their applications in.

Sure.

Thank you.

Thank you, madam chair.

Any other questions?

Uh yeah, just can you share that information for each of our districts?

Can you share that with all of us?

Uh yes, I could say that.

Yeah.

And then what was that amount you said for Madison again?

Just in comparison.

According to their website, and uh granted this was this was initially done in 2024 when we did this, and that's when the um the budget process was.

It was five five dollars and fifty cents a square foot around the um around the campus uh and around the capital.

And it was three dollars a square foot elsewhere.

And that's where there's no cars allowed.

On that street, they don't even allow cars.

It's walkable.

So we can't it's not real fair comparison, but that's okay.

Oh, okay.

So this is this is for sidewalks, so I guess uh cars, uh no parking on the and the capital is down the block from Madison, the university.

Yes, which has over 40,000 students.

So and I've been one of those students walking that street, so it's like a built-in audience of Russell.

I guess why.

All right, uh there woman Tyler will move adoption.

I mean passage.

Are there any objections?

Hearing uh so ordered.

Item 11, file number 241250, substitute resolution directing the department of public works to examine the feasibility of creating a dedicated scatter site, a walk replacement crew.

And this is sponsored by myself, Pratt, um chambers, more Stanford, and Zamarepa.

There, this was uh, I believe this is a follow-up to the footnote.

So I'm not expecting expecting a report out.

It'll be a communication file on that.

This is just to, as we know, footnotes don't have a um a formal whatever.

The resolution is what gives it to them.

And so this is that.

So you ain't got a report out, you ain't gotta this is just to technically get us up to speed where we're where we should be.

We will do a communication file for you through all that.

Um so I don't know, and I'll just let members know that even when I did the footnote, the department was waiting now I gotta think about it.

Yeah, did we already do all of that?

Yeah, chairwoman, this one if if I may, uh this one was part of amendment.

I think it was amendment.

But it was an amendment to the 2026 budget, a follow-on from the footnote you're referencing in this file.

Okay, okay.

So we are on task.

Okay.

So that's the that's the that's the purpose of this.

I don't know if it's anything you want to share here today, but the the report back on the status model, you could do that at the communication file.

Okay.

But what I was trying to say before my mind went somewhere else was that um the department when I kind of with a footnote, it was I know what it was.

It was a follow-up um to conversations we had, it may be even a whole different footnote, um, where the department was more than willing to do it.

And we looked at um how that can happen even in this um last budget, what would need to happen in order to services to still continue with the replacement, but giving you enough time to be able to stand up a team.

So I said I had to say um department has been more than willing to um to help work this out.

And I look forward to the report out at some point.

Sure.

But um, but this was just to technically get it up to speed.

Sure.

Um record.

Um were there any questions from committee?

All right.

Um is there anything you want to say?

Yeah, I can give a brief, very brief update on this.

So um as you said, uh chairwoman, it's it there's a footnote to study it, I think, with the 2025 budget, and then there was an amendment to fund and get into motion with the 2026 budget.

Um so just very briefly on the getting it in motion, we are underway.

Um so right now we're procuring the equipment that was in that memo, the trucks uh that were necessary.

Um we're also in the process of um uh acquiring the staff, getting the staff uh to make it happen.

Um right now we're tentatively thinking July will be the beginning of us mobilizing city staff to do this work, as you just alluded to.

Um there will be money um available in the capital budget that we won't consume with our staff this year that we will use to contract out.

So this work will continue kind of on two streams for this year, and then probably 2027 is when we would shift it primarily internal then.

Yeah, as we stand this up.

So that's our update.

Are there any other questions on committee?

I think it is.

Okay.

All right, thank you.

Audderman West Mormon would uh move uh to adoption.

Are there any objections to that motion?

Hearing that so ordered.

Um, because we already dealt with 12.

Um file number two five two two three two resolution authorizing a proper city um offices to accept various city utility easements in uh uh vacated north 32nd Street and West Wright Street and to execute quick claim deeds.

QCD uh 2894 and QCD 2948 conveying combined in storm sewers at um a l-o Wisconsin LLC in the 15th Automatic District.

Yeah, good morning, thank you.

Uh Robert Sane, Department of Public Works.

Uh, this relates to a certified survey map that covers the property that is formerly the master lack facility.

They're vacating right away and changing lot lines around.

So we want to convey sewers that no longer uh benefit for the public to them and put our sewers that we still need access to and easement.

So any questions from committee.

Alderman Bauman will move adoption.

Hearing no objections, so ordered, thank you.

Uh item number 14, file number two five two two three eight resolution relating to the acceptance and funding of a Wisconsin Department of Transportation Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality City of Milwaukee route optimization grant.

Hello, Rick Meyer Sanitation Services Manager.

Uh this this um grant would uh the premise of this grant is to uh have some funds to assist us in the cost uh for some professional services related to rerouting our garbage and recycling, um the funding source, the um you know, through the DOT, the congestion uh mitigation air quality, the the angle is is that we would produce um some you know hopefully reduce travel times, reduced um ailing and and reduced vehicle use um by um by rerouting our system are there any questions from committee?

Sure.

Honor Westmarel.

Sanitation is supposed to report potholes.

Um well we asked all DPW here.

Yeah, yeah.

So what it it's it's so we asked all all the DPW staff, sanitation are are you know reminded at meetings so on be to report city issues, whatever it may be.

Um it isn't a like uh a uh required routine like I'm turning this in every year.

So it's not like I've already I'm just trying to see if it's true or not that they are supposed to report, so they're not supposed it's not part of their job description.

It's part of a requirement.

I mean again, we not pothole specific, but we're specifically talking potholes on this.

Yeah, I mean we do ask any again, whether it's a uh traffic light out, it's a sign down, it's a pothole.

Like we we ask our staff, it's all all DPW be aware of those things and get them reported.

Are you able to provide a report on sanitation reported potholes?

No, we don't have that.

There is a uh a future where you know this this onboard truck system we've talked about that we've implemented for routing um that is something that could be potentially um developed so it's more of a trackable but right now it's kind of how um you know how Tom Wangren described it it's like they'll they'll let they might just say hey to their supervisor or call the office uh radio and be like hey this this location you could report this pothole and then we you know we do it through that channel but it isn't as trackable to so from an efficiency standpoint there's no way to measure if they're participating in reporting city issues we don't keep any statistics on it no we don't thank you any other questions from committee I don't know what's Marlon would move um adoption hearing no objections so next item 15 uh file number two five two two three nine resolution relating to the development of a plan to create security zones on public right aways in areas designated as entertainment districts bombing if I may uh basically this is a file to for some years there's been discussion about ways to curtail and mitigate violence and disorder on the Water Street entertainment district and to a lesser degree the King Drive entertainment district and some of those discussions have involved the possibility of creating a secure perimeter around those entertainment districts which is done in some other cities we are told and this file basically directs various departments to put together a plan to so we can see what that would look like, what type of equipment would be involved who would operate this perimeter would it be Milwaukee police would it be contractors equally important who would pay for this what would be the cost what are the pros and cons would it be effective would it be ineffective there's just been general discussion up to this point but no one's actually gotten down to any specific details so I would expect DPW to be involved for sure uh MPD to be involved for sure the Department of Community Wellness and Safety certainly should be involved as well as private stakeholders BID 21 uh MSOE for sure uh so people can see what this might look like because the trend we're on with the violence on Water Street is very very concerning uh if the perception takes hold that downtown is somehow unsafe and dangerous uh that perception will be very difficult to dislodge that could have significant economic impacts on the viability of downtown and once again I remind everyone that downtown represents 21% of the city's tax base but only three percent of its land area.

So it's very important that we protect the viability of downtown Milwaukee for the benefit of the residents who live there the businesses that do business there and the in some cases tens of thousands of visitors that will come downtown on a given weekend especially when there's multiple events going on at FICER forum at the live nation venue at the Wisconsin Center District venue you can easily have 50 40 50 thousand people visiting the downtown area when all those different venues are going.

So I think it's this is something we want to get this is not to implement such a plan uh I don't know that I even support a security zone concept but we should at least know what we're talking about when we discuss the concept of a security zone.

So the discuss the decision to implement would be at a later date after substantial public input and input from all the different stakeholders so that's that's the file your honor that's the file madam chair.

Thank you um Ottawa Enballman are there any uh questions on committee bombing would uh move um I before we vote I do I want to say this um I'm gonna support the file because I don't think it's anything wrong with um you know getting as much information as possible and examining things but I also want you know residents uh watching to know that um though much attention has been paid to you know recent activities um in downtown on Water Street and all of that um that um we do and I know I do um care about the safety and security of every neighborhood um I don't ever want people to feel like um we're putting more attention and more concern about um downtown or the business is downtown than we are for the very neighborhoods um that people um reside in I think um this is just one tool um to look at um entertainment districts and I think we um deal with vote on and debate about um other tools for um neighborhoods every single day um that we are also trying to

Um I don't ever want people to feel like um we're putting more attention and more concern about um downtown or the businesses downtown than we are for the very neighborhoods um that people um reside in.

I think um this is just one tool um to look at um entertainment districts and I think we um deal with vote on and debate about um other tools for um neighborhoods every single day um that we are also trying to eliminate or at least decrease um crimes um in Israel um and disorder.

Um so with that um Ottoman uh bombing would uh move um adoption.

Um if there are um no objections um that motion uh passes.

Uh next up, we have item seven uh sixteen item sixteen, um file number two six zero zero one two resolution consenting to the termination of the common ownership requirement of the properties located at twelve forty-five through forty-seven and twelve thirty-three North Water Street as it relates to an existing restrictive covenant in the fourth automatic district.

This is sponsored by Otterman Balming, Otterman Bomb.

Yeah, this is somewhat of a technical matter.

There was a restrictive covenant uh attached to this property many years ago in the late 1980s.

And uh the reason according to Department of City Development, they claim the reason for this restricted covenant of joint ownership is no longer relevant, no longer needed, and the property owners are requesting it be lifted to facilitate the sale of one of the properties.

So I I have no objection.

Any questions from committee?

Other man bombing moves adoption, hearing no objection, motion passes.

Next up, item 17, file number two five, two two four four resolution relating to the operation of Dockless Mobility Systems.

There's actually two files here.

Okay.

Item 18, uh file number two five, two two four five, and ordinance relating to uh dockless mobility uh systems.

If I may go ahead.

The original purpose of these two files was to again addressing violence in our entertainment districts, was to limit the the use of scooters in those entertainment districts.

Turned out the department was already on on the road to doing exactly that in collaboration with MPD, and they actually have a outline of various protocols which they intend to implement.

And I'm I I say that's fine.

I I'm willing to go along with what they've provided here, and I think it would be useful for them to explain what it is they're going to do.

So it i i in the end, but neither of these files need to be passed or approved because we're doing this administratively.

So please why don't you discuss what's planned?

Sure.

Thank you, Chairwoman.

Thank you, Alderman Mike Amston, uh transportation planning manager at DPW.

Uh yeah, I'll turn it over here to Zach quickly, but we've been in uh constant communication with MPD over the past several years and even more so last year and through the past winter to identify a proactive approach to address some of the issues, uh, some related to scooters downtown, some related to bigger issues downtown to help mitigate some of the concern and we're we've we've actually implemented those policies and we'll continue to implement those policies and we're confident that uh they've been effective to date and we're hopeful that they'll continue to be so going forward.

So I'll let Zach quickly go through them.

Yeah, sure.

Uh Zach Roder, Senior Transportation Planner of the Department of Public Works.

Um historically we've going back to the pilot program um for the Dockle Scooter program, we we had zones uh uh uh no-ride zone established um in those downtown entertainment districts on on Historic Third Street and then um Water Street um within that code red area.

Um uh Carmen Um is the um included up in here.

Thanks.

I attached them to the file.

The maps are worth a thousand words, you know.

Yeah, definitely.

Um while this is getting set up though, I I can can I continue a little bit.

Uh you know, as last year, as Mike said, we worked with MPD, and I think what's what's um great about the tools we have is we can we can be adaptive and like iterate on different um uh and as we learn um and and work closely with MPD um to to figure out where we can be most effective with the zones um and the restrictions that we have.

So last year, as more issues arose downtown, uh we were we you know collaborated closely with MPD to identify um changes and implement kind of some stricter regulations at different times of the year.

Um from from that experience, you know, we learned and and we you know our our partners at MPD agree we wanted to have a kind of a plan in place that's like laid out with a schedule of policies um for for the year.

Um so we um we have we have that in in there and um Carmen is this are the maps up on your put them on the file, yes.

They're in the file.

Okay.

How can I access that?

I'm sorry about that.

Well that's uh your problems.

I think we may again you can see how one second here.

When um as you're doing that, yeah, when are you looking at implementation of the plan?

Yeah.

Yeah, so the the plan's already already on underway.

Um we kind of had our kind of kick off meeting with um MPD for this year in March.

April 1st is when the first policy rolls out.

We have a diff additional kind of layers of that added on in May, May 1st, so this this coming weekend and then June 1st.

Um the kind of the most strict kind of regulations last through Labor Day weekend uh and then the rollout it kind of um decreases in intensity um with those restrictions then ease after uh the end of October.

So there's kind of a rise up and rise down.

Uh great, thank you for pulling that up, appreciate it.

Can we just share here?

Yeah, sure.

It's not sharing though.

All right, you can see the zones now.

Um the graphics we have.

Thanks for bearing with us there while we set that up.

Um so this is the the primary zone that we've historically used going back to our pilot programs, centered mostly around uh this is kind of between McKinley 6th state and um Market Street.

Um this zone went into effect um starting April 1st.

It's on Friday and Saturday nights uh from 8 p.m.

to 4 a.m.

kind of in correspondence with uh the code red um procedures and stuff that MPD um has in that area.

Um let's continue on to the next one here.

Sorry, there we go.

Um starting May 1st.

I mean, this is something we're adding on to that in response to some of the um it you know issues and concerns um we've seen in the area.

Um this weekend there's a no ride zone on on West Town Center, primarily around um Wisconsin Avenue, um that's uh uh goes in at a later time period, so starting at 10 p.m.

to 4 a.m.

Uh then it continues on June 1st is when we roll out a couple additional measures.

So one of them is the uh water Brady no ride zone, which you can see here.

Both this zone and that west town zone include some cut throughs for mobility.

We want people to still be able um to get north and south and east and west to you know uh to the different neighborhoods.

For example, going north into Harama and River West Um along Van Buren and Holton there is one example.

Um so water and brady, that's that's a no-ride zone that starts at 10 p.m.

We also have a slow zone, basically a little bit of a buffer around that um orange zone that's in the middle that goes in in place um at this time that kind of slows people down half speed as they approach that zone.

Uh and then the uh in in collaboration with MPD, we've also kind of extended that um central primary zone to Thursday nights starting June 1st uh when we know activity um is increased.

And so that kind of that kind of explains the rollout as we build up.

And then after Labor Day, these restrictions that are shown here kind of start to recede a little bit.

We have uh it goes back to these zones um until the end of October.

And then you got the panic plan, right?

Yep, that's correct.

I can pull that up too.

So there's um kind of two kind of emergency zones we call them.

If you know, in working with our partners, we have bi weekly meetings with our uh partners at MPD um in District One.

If if there are things that we we really need to address short term, we do have the ability to kind of pull um we have the orange zone there is what we call the partial zone.

Um the lighter blue color is the full zone, and we we we can adapt these to the circumstances at hand.

Um if you know, and in uh we we like to include those kind of cut throughs for mobility um where we need them, uh but if it you know if if the circumstances uh demand it, we also can kind of cut off that entire thing.

The commissioner of public works.

It would have to be the commissioner.

Can someone can he designate someone?

What is what if he's on vacation or up fishing or it's under our kind of authorities, our own.

And I would say it's in conjunction with NPD, really.

Typically, the call would go out on a Saturday night.

I mean, when people are presumably home and not sitting in their office.

And MPD has contact information out with our operators as well.

So MPD can also trigger this, the captain or the or the lieutenant on duty or whoever is in command of the code red operation that they we work with the community leaders on officer uh officers from district one and they would notify our our team of it and comfortable that's efficient enough.

I mean uh going through three, four different people would seem rather cumbersome if there's some great concern taking place.

The the the if there is like a live concern in one of our um you know strategies um too is that you know if there's an immediate issue on the ground, they we also have that contact information for the operators, which is the direct like the direct switch to to turn something on or off is with the operator.

So we have that.

Ultimately has control of the switch, not us.

We have to call somebody would have to call Lyme and say, okay, implement plan B.

And then they could presumably do that from somewhere, somewhere remotely at the what their local team is based out of uh uh West Milwaukee is where their kind of operations are based on.

Correct.

Okay.

Audible woman Taylor.

So are you saying that you can um like um shut down the uh scooters?

Or you can shut them down so if they get into those areas, yeah, those no-ride zones, you can just shut them off.

They'll just stop working up.

There's a technology that's called geofencing.

Uh-huh.

That can uh designate zones where they can't can't operate at all, or they can operate at slower speeds.

Oh they refund it?

Because you pay for those rides.

No, no you're not.

Are we down to one operator now?

Currently we have one operator, yeah.

So one of them left contract runs through May 16th.

May 16th.

They chose not to renew or to redeploy um this this bridge.

So Lyme is a sole operator now, currently.

Yep.

So does it I'm sorry.

So like say it if I'm riding one of those scooters and I get into an area uh known to me that is a no-rise zone.

And so it stops working.

If I like pick it up and carry it to the next block and it is a ride zone, can I start riding again?

Yes.

So when a user kind of enters the no ride zone, the acceleration on the on the scooter kicks off, and so you decelerate to a stop, you're still able to kind of yeah, drag the scooter around a little bit.

Sometimes people will get into that zone, turn around if they kind of kick push it out of the zone, and then they can once you're outside of that zone though, yes, then the acceleration will turn back on.

Okay.

Yep.

And users when they start their ride on the app, it does show the various zones or restrictions.

So, you know, not that everyone's paying attention to that per se, but there is information in the app saying where you can or cannot be at that time.

Yep.

Okay.

Any other questions from committee?

Uh Otterman Bomb, would you like to place them on file?

Yeah, put you can place both these items on file.

The motion by Artoman Bomb for both um item 17 and 18 is to place on file.

Are there any objections to that motion?

Hearing that's the order.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Uh item 19 has been dealt with.

Item 20, uh file number one nine one nine three zero.

Communication from the department of public works relating to the status of current and future operations.

Uh sponsor by honor and historically, I think we've covered a fair amount of those ground already under leaf collection potholes, unless the department has something pressing to add in addition.

Nope.

Uh Madam Chair, uh committee members, Chuck Schumacher, operations administration manager, um, happy to answer any questions you have.

Um but as Alderman Bauman.

We had parking in in the house.

Uh they got anything to say?

No, they're here for moral support.

Uh well, and bomb will move to how to call the chair.

Are any objections hearing that's the order?

Thank you.

Thank you.

Um item 21 motion relating to the recommendations of the public works committee relating to licenses, file number two five one eight six three.

Do you want to raise your right hand, please?

You sort of for under the penalties and sanctions authority of the state of Wisconsin that the testimony you're about to give is the truth and only the truth.

Yes, miss.

Yes, thank you.

Wait, is this um Andrew Rousey?

And let me see.

And Sheldon?

Yes, ma'am.

Oh, okay.

Public passenger vehicle driver's license applications.

Okay.

Are you in receipt of notice of today's meeting with the possibility that your application may be denied?

Yes.

Yes.

All right.

Um please state your name and address for the record.

Sheldon Rousey, 4358 North 61st Street, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

53216.

Adre Rousey 4358, North 61st Street, 53216, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Are there any hogs?

No holds.

Public passengers.

Is there a police report, Sergeant?

Uh do you want me to read both of them back to back or one at a time?

Yeah.

Oh, well.

Do you mind being taken up together?

No.

Okay.

For Andrew Rousey, on 1516, the applicant was cited for operating while intoxicated.

I'm 422 16.

He was convicted in his driver's license was revoked for nine months.

On 2519, the applicant was charged in Milwaukee County with drive or operate vehicle without consent, a felony.

If he's found guilty, there's amended to uh drive operate without consent passenger, which is a misdemeanor, sentence to four days of house correction.

On 7124, the applicant was charged in Ozaki County with possession with intent THC, second and sub subsequent offense, which is a felony, and possession of drug paraphernalia, which is a misdemeanor, is scheduled for court on 513 of 26.

And for Sheldon Rosey.

On 21817, the applicant was charged in Milwaukee County with two counts of possession within Tanco King, keeping a drug house first degree felon right recklessly endangering safety and second degree recklessly endangering safety, all felonies.

He was found guilty of the obsession with intention cocaine, party to a crime.

It was amended to that charge.

And he was also found guilty of a second degree recklessly endangering safety.

Found guilty eight years state prison.

On 32417, the applicant was charged in Ogami County with resisting or obstructing an officer and misdemeanor.

Found guilty 90 days local jail.

And the applicant is on parole for item one, an email notification to the Wisconsin Department of Corrections on 2126 requesting they provide information to the license division regarding the parole status and the end date of that status.

Madam Chair.

Yes.

Okay, for let's be let's start with um Andrew.

Did you want to speak to the police record?

Um as far as well.

This is your opportunity to um explain any additional details or information that might be helpful um for us as we decide um whether or not you should get this license after we just heard what your record is.

Um any does the committee have any questions for Andrew about the police record?

The Karma, this is a new application for license of yola.

Is this a new Andrew's room?

Yes, both uh applications are new.

Okay.

And Sergeant, the item item three has a pass court date, but not a determination.

So has it been pushed out again or it was pushed out to May 13?

Okay.

Okay.

Um I do I do have a question.

Um I was asking comment, but maybe you know probably is it a reason I say as high as my hair?

has a pass court date but not a determination so has it been pushed out again or it was pushed out to May 13 okay tell me what the items have to be discussed in the training okay um I do I do have a question um I was asking comment but maybe you know probably is it a reason that City Attorney's not here no I'm not sure and I'm gonna be quite honest I don't until I know that answer I actually don't feel comfortable moving forward okay um and and I'll let you applicants know in all fairness to you um these are pretty serious records and there may be questions or thoughts that members may have that may or not may or may not supposed to be used legally in our determination and generally we would ask the city attorney the assistant city attorney that that's why they're usually sitting there and they're not here today and I don't want us to make any decisions that could help or hurt you know what I'm saying your situation without us being as informed as possible so we uh uh unless I can get here in a minute we probably because we do have to clear out shortly for the next committee we may have to hold um your I know you've been sitting here all day but I want to make sure that you all are treated as fairly as possible um with this process so we're gonna take um a brief um break see if we can figure this out but we may end up having to hold you guys I'm just being honest with you um so I'll just call a recess for a couple of minutes the members could stay around um because this will be towards the end of the agenda anyway uh we were not successful in getting uh um assistant city attorney down here quickly um and since they had to prepare for the next committee um I will be in you all our new applications I will um be asking my colleagues to hold you all some applications to the next meeting um so the motion by Alderman Ballman is to hold to the call of the chair um with the intention of bringing you back for the next meeting um are there any objections to that motion hearing none so order and my apologies and next time you're here we'll make sure that the city attorney is here so you won't have this issue thank you have one more item to the days on fire thank you the next um item is our final item uh 22 uh file two five zero seven nine nine a charter ordinance creating a department to be known as the Milwaukee Waterworks this is sponsored by Otterman Spiker I see him on the board Otterman Spider was there anything you want to say before we place this on file he's being gone oh okay um because it didn't no longer need it so um this uh has been requested to be placed on file is no longer needed so alderman Westmoreland will um move to place on file is there any objection to that motion hearing now so ordered without any further business we are adjourned