"It's very satisfying to see something that you've worked 20 years on starting to show benefit for other people."
- Kevin Shafer on his work with the MMSD
Things like rain barrels or rain gardens are pretty common in the Milwaukee-area for both businesses and residential homes. But at the beginning of Kevin Shafer’s tenure leading the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District, it was extremely hard to convince people about the benefits of green infrastructure.
In fact, MMSD was very unpopular, even hated, when Shafer first started working there as an engineer. During the so-called “sewer wars,” Milwaukee’s sewer system released untreated wastewater into streams, rivers and Lake Michigan an average of 60 times a year. Today, that's down to just a couple of times a year.
That’s thanks in large part to Shafer’s leadership of MMSD since 2002. This month's Milwaukee Magazine issue highlights his time and work with the organization.
While spending time on his grandparents' farm in his native central Illinois, Shafer developed an interest in water quality early in his life. After graduating from school and spending time in the Army Corps of Engineers, Shafer soon found himself at MMSD in 1998 as the head of the engineering department. When he arrived, the "sewer wars" were in full force.
"In 1972, the Clean Water Act passed, and almost immediately after that, the City of Milwaukee was sued for a combined sewer and separate sewer overflows into Lake Michigan by Illinois and Chicago," Shafer explains. "And so the sewer wars was a battle over who was going to pay for the deep tunnel, and for some of those improvements, basically pitting the in Milwaukee County communities against the out of Milwaukee County communities."
When Shafer became executive director, he inherited a system that allowed an average of about between eight and nine billion gallons of wastewater into Lake Michigan each year. One of his first tasks was changing the tunnel operation system from a computer algorithm to personal management, which drastically reduced the number of these incidents.
Another big focus for Shafer was responding to the threat that climate change posed to the water industry. Rain barrels weren't an overly popular idea in the early 2000s when Shafer first proposed them, but they've had an impact on the environment. "As those efforts grew, and as more and more came into operation, we're seeing more water being captured off those rooftops instead of going into the sewer system," says Shafer.
After over 20 years, Shafer is still invigorated to continue the work.
Shafer says, "Trying to make this community more resilient to climate change with less flooding; that's the stuff that brings me [joy] every day, and mostly it's working with some really phenomenal people here at the district."
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