The Milwaukee City Council convened to review the status of negotiations with Washington County regarding the Milwaukee Bay Park, present Q4 2025 and forecast metrics for economic development, discuss board and committee recruitment timelines, address legislative updates, and hear from various council members on community issues. The meeting highlighted positive momentum in intergovernmental negotiations, detailed discussions on improving business friendliness metrics, and a strong emphasis on intentional, community-driven placemaking strategies for the upcoming year.
We had a little bit of delay, and so had uh temporary measure people can advance the walking part of the government remain discussion first items. The slides are up right now, so I think we may as well go along there and uh I put this by enough to help uh remind us for the work. So briefly previous episode, if you might recall, last year, back in way back in twenty twenty-five where we left off. Uh we had a great discussion on December sixteenth among the council about what we should do with our response um from our disappointment to the counties, basically awesome. Um lively debate. We got to a place where we kind of considered and made it on acceptable financial terms. Uh, the council decided to allow the mayor to draft those financial terms in a letter and send it over to the county, kind of as like the teams are what we find acceptable at this point and willing to move forward. And we would love to see some positive momentum or from the county by accepting the board in twenty twenty-six, in the current episode that we're in January thirteenth, we received a response um after the recession on recess on January thirteenth. I think um Councillor Massie would say is positive with positive movement. Um, and essentially, if you look at the first slide in the first episode, we asked for five point six million on the next slide. It's probably better. Do I need to move? Yes to the proportional metro, yes, the trolley triple grant. Um, they did not say yes to modesty waivers. We can talk about that staff at a later date, which is fine. Um, and then they did come up, didn't mean this at three point six million in the SDC conversation, but they met us at three point three. So our original was three point one million of current STCs with a five hundred thousand dollar ask of accrued SDCs between now and the time the park is built. They met three point one current STCs, and they said about two hundred thousand interests between now and then. Um, and it's that's where we stand. So overall, we got four point eight six million on the table. Um as opposed to the 5.16 that we originally started at. So we've they've come up and we feel like there's some positive here. We'd love to see your staff take these numbers and put them in to uh draft IGs again so that we can start discussing staff to staff before have them heard of the day they met and they did not finish that discussion so they're continuing the discussion to next week. Hopefully we receive data draft IGA when you know any issues. That's the update. I hope is the next steps really are draft IJs in hand and staff to staff conversations about um it's small ticket items, so to speak. Peter would say those are not small ticket items, but to clarify the county is just discussing putting those terms into the draft IG and already agreed to those terms, or they had collective consensus to advance those terms to us. Yeah, I understand they sent us over their response back to our counter. So those are their numbers for using their numbers. So we say that essentially that sounds good. So we said that's the draft idea is showing those updates, and we'll go from there. Did I miss anything, Councillor Massie? No, I think that the first uh sort of uh positive movement operated by the web city. Um it's not exactly what we want, but we know that this is like a negotiation, and you know, there's some other things pops that we worked out. I think that there's at least uh you know a uh glad path to help with complete the negotiations and come up with something that's uh that we can work for them. I will tell you that there's uh from my point of view, there's a there's a there's some uh sense of urgency from my perspective because obviously this is not going to pay for everything, so we have to uh seek additional funding sources and one of those big grails, and so there's uh some windows of rent applications that are opening very soon, and I think that we would have trouble uh gathering um those grant submissions if this between us and the county is not set up because they're gonna look at those and say you do we want to give them a grant when they're still feuding with each other and they can't decide what they want to do. And if we have if not all of it substantially behind us, then we're more likely to be successful with the grant submission process. And that uh I mean we'll never get all the grants that we kind of have on our wish list, but it's a substantial. Yeah, those are good additions. Uh so yeah, expediency. We've always wanted this to go faster than asked. We do hope that we can get to someplace within the next month or so. Any questions or anything? Um, I just want to say thank you to the county. Um I think that this is a really good step forward, and there are a lot of choose your own adventure paths that could have been taken through this process, and I just really appreciate that they're having a constructive conversation about this. I don't think it's an easy one, and it's certainly not for us, but it's really not for them. Um given everything that they're taking into account and everything at the national level. Um it's really hard to prioritize forward movement in this, and they did. So I know you're watching. Thank you.