Milwaukee-area communities continue to recover from the recent historic rainfall and damaging winds in April. To lessen future flood damage, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District has accelerated its flood management program.
The agency also formed a flood mitigation task force with city and county officials. Now, the city’s Department of Public Works has announced new flood prevention efforts, which require residents to change their habits.
The DPW shared the changes coming to its street sweeping and leaf collection operations during a meeting of the Common Council’s Public Works Committee on April 29. This comes after some residents and elected officials have blamed the DPW for street and property flooding following record-breaking rain totals for the month of April.
Starting this year, the city will install permanent signs on what are called exception streets. Those are streets where vehicles can be parked on either side. The signs are an effort to improve street sweeping by indicating which side of the road cars should be parked. The move is to make it easier for street sweepers to do a thorough job — lessening the amount of garbage that can clog sewer grates and cause flooding.
DPW Commissioner Jerrell Kruschke explained what will happen when people don’t obey the new signs.
"The con to this is we are going to end up towing a lot of vehicles to access those," he said. "But the signs will be permanent. They’re not going to be temporary. It’s going to be the third Tuesday [of every month] and the goal is to do street sweeping from May 1 all the way to November 1."
Illegally-parked vehicles would be towed, relocated within the neighborhood and receive tow fees and citations. The areas most impacted by this change will be districts 3, 4, 6 and 12, with other neighborhoods partially affected. In total, exception streets account for about 30% of streets in the city.
Kruschke says a good portion of the signs will be installed this year, but it could take up to three years before the city installs them all.
The second change the DPW announced is how leaf collection works. Instead of piling leaves near the curb, residents will now have to bag them. It’s an effort to keep debris out of the city’s catch basins and sewage system.
"That means not pushing leaves into the parking lane — not parking on top of them," Kruschke said. "But if we can’t get to it, let’s say a snowstorm happened like right around Thanksgiving time, the bags will be sitting there on the side where we can collect them at a later date."
DPW faces criticism
In a statement on April 20, District 4 Alderman Robert Bauman said the severity of the previous week’s flooding wasn’t just because of the historic rainfall. He wrote it was because of the city’s “botched leaf pickup operations.”
At the April 29 Public Works Committee meeting, Bauman addressed the DPW directly. He said the department’s claim that street sweeping is made more difficult on exception streets is not the issue.
"During the day, my streets are almost completely open because everybody is at work," said Bauman. "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."
Bauman suggested better schedule management at the DPW.
"This seems to fall on deaf ears," he added. "Now the chickens are coming home to roost. Now, there’s 10 people sitting here angry as hell because their constituents are angry as hell. Work smart."
Kruschke shared figures at the meeting that detail the DPW’s response efforts during the extreme weather in April. He said there were over 1,700 sewer-related calls. The DPW’s Forestry Services, which manages trees and green spaces, responded to over 300 calls.
"These floods and the intensity of rain is changing on a yearly basis," said Kruschke. "What we’ve seen in August, what we’ve seen this week. Even what we’ve seen on Monday — not high rains, but we’ve seen intense winds coming across our city — has been stressing not only DPW but the whole entire region."
As for the DPW’s efficiency at leaf collection, Kruschke said the DPW gathered over 13,000 tons of leaves between last fall and this spring. That’s 1,500 more than the previous year.
District 3 Alderman Alex Brower asked Kruschke about the DPW’s staffing.
"In the '80s, '90s, did we have more or less people at DPW?" Brower asked. "What have been some of the macro employment trends over the decades with our Department of Public Works?"
Kruschke said the department has faced annual budget cuts for decades, which has led to a continual decrease in the workforce, affecting hundreds of staff. He added that technology has helped make up for some of the eliminated and vacant positions.
Kruschke said there isn’t a set timeline for when these changes will go into effect, but the DPW is working on ways to communicate future updates with the public.
