The July 17, 2026 study session focused on prioritizing five major downtown capital projects given limited urban renewal area (URA) funds, staff capacity, and construction impacts. Council discussed trade-offs between the Main Street Enhancements project and Milwaukee Bay Park, with significant consideration of ongoing operations and maintenance costs, general fund sustainability, and community expectations. After extensive debate, council reached consensus to prioritize Milwaukee Bay Park (Option B), deferring Main Street enhancements and reallocating URA dollars.
Oh, right. Oh, right. So it says stop sharing. That's right. No matter. Okay. Should I stop sharing? No, it's going to go to your video's going. I can see. You can see the next year. I can see his audio's on. I can see the recording. What end is definitely our shift? No. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Oh, the DAC or hello everyone. Sorry, we're just getting set up in the front. Are we being recorded? All right. It's our uh what is today? July 14th study session on downtown capital improvement priorities. Prioritization. I'll turn it over to Emma. Thank you, Mayor. And thanks. We do have a Zoom audience tonight watching us. Um we're gonna dive in. So uh why? Why are we having this discussion? Why have we dedicated a uh study session to this topic? Um you know, I think this is actually a really exciting uh conversation because it's spurred on by this council and previous councils. Some of these projects have been have been on the docket for many, many years. Um the real momentum we have in our DAC account and the real desire to invest in some transformative capital improvements that could reshape um downtown for generations to come. I think what's also really exciting about all those projects that we've been talking about for years is that they really hit all of council's goals. They hit parks and green space, they did economic development, and they could support affordability in terms of affordable housing. Um that's the awesome part. There's no dearth of great ideas and great opportunities in the downtown core of Milwaukee. The sort of reality check part is that resources are limited. Um, because these are all in that downtown core, they all potentially compete for urban renewal um area dollars. We're very excited and happy to see that the tax increment in the um urban renewal district is doing its job, it is growing, but it's a finite pool of money as well, and it cannot cover every single thing we might want to do on the capital front downtown. We also um have a wonderful staff, but we don't have uh a limited staff, and and these projects, I kind of jokingly call them the downtown mega projects. Um they they are big and they're in some of them are gonna be multi-year, and they're gonna require a lot on the design front, the construction management front, the community engagement front, and um we're gonna need to be judicious in how we apply staff to that. We also have a finite amount of space. So you do a lot of construction in an area, you gotta put all the vehicles and the equipment to do that. So we have to think about construction staging, and we also can think about construction impacts. It's really um easy to think about how great it's gonna be when projects are done. There's that painful middle, no one likes construction, and we've built such a great momentum in our downtown core with um thriving small businesses that we have to be mindful of the disruption, construction and cost. Uh it's very important, I believe, that we prioritize and we make sure staff are aware of how you as council want us to prioritize these major projects so that we can deliver this transformative change but in a sustainable and strategic way. Okay, so what are the projects we're actually talking about tonight?