Milwaukee officials recently announced the creation of a Flood Mitigation Task Force. It’s a county-wide effort to help spread awareness, improve public infrastructure and generate funding.
The announcement comes after heavy rainfall in August 2025 and April of this year caused extensive flooding and damage in the Milwaukee area.
On May 27 and 28, a community event brought dozens of flood victims together at the Wisconsin Black Historical Society to share their stories and concerns.
It was a two-day strategy blitz where residents spoke about how they’re still recovering and what actions they’d like local government to take. Marco Rueda shared how the August 2025 flood damaged his south side Milwaukee home.
"We went to sleep and in the middle of the night we heard a really loud storm," Rueda, who speaks Spanish, said through a translator. "We heard a lot of thunder. We got up early in the morning and we found water in our basement – a lot of water."
Rueda says his family spent three days cleaning their basement. He says it was an eye-sore to see the piles of debris in his neighborhood sit for days before the city picked it up.
"We lost a lot of furniture that was downstairs, camping equipment, our tent. We love to camp and all of that was lost," says Rueda.
Donna Petty rents a home in Milwaukee. She says she lost a lot in the August flood.
"I have nine kids, so just imagine you losing clothes, stuff that was downstairs," says Petty. "Our stuff flooded so bad."
Petty says she wasn’t just upset about losing expensive home appliances, like a deep freezer. What hurt her the most was throwing away sentimental items, like pictures passed down from her grandmother.
That’s why she wants residents to receive more help after future floods.
"The resources that we should have gotten, we didn’t get," she says. "I feel like that was unfair because a lot of people did get help. We’re in worse situations, literally, than them. I was upset."
Milwaukee-area officials hope to address concerns like these with the new Flood Mitigation Task Force. The task force includes Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson, County Executive David Crowley, and Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District Executive Director Kevin Shafer.
Crowley says after the August floods, local government was left responsible for $20 to 30 million in infrastructure repair and improvement costs. That’s because the federal government denied the state’s request for public infrastructure funding from FEMA. It did approve a FEMA request to help individual flood victims.
"We’re going to continue to lean on the governor as we continue to have conversations about what we can do," Crowley says. "But we really need the federal government, and quite frankly the Trump administration, to step up when it comes down to our public infrastructure and making sure it’s maintained and improved and fixed because of these extreme weathers."
Crowley says when considering funding options to repair flood damage, everything is on the table. But he wants to avoid that cost landing on taxpayers.
"We know that the City of Milwaukee, Milwaukee County and MMSD are taxing entities, but that’s not necessarily the route that we want to take," he says. "We want to see how we can build upon the relationship that we have with our state and federal partners to bring down as much resources as possible."
MMSD Executive Director Kevin Shafer attended the community meeting. Shafer says in the short term, the task force will work to educate people on homeowners’ insurance and create public service announcements on topics like how to clean debris from neighborhood sewer drains.
"On the long-term, we need to look and see if there is additional infrastructure that’s needed or increasing the size of existing infrastructure to handle some of these larger storms," Shafer says. "A normal street drain on a roadway is meant to handle like a five- or 10-year storm. A very normal, small storm. We got hit with a 1,000-year storm in August, so it just inundated the system."
Meanwhile, the MMSD is facing criticism from some local officials, like Ald. Marina Dimitrijevic and Common Council President José Pérez.
At an April Public Works Committee meeting, District 1 Ald. Andrea Pratt shared that areas in her district routinely flood during heavy rainfall.
Pérez asked Shafer why conversations on how to reduce flooding at hotspots are just happening now.
"Ald. Pratt's flooding isn't based on huge storms," Pérez said at the meeting. "It happens every year."
At the meeting, Shafer said MMSD is working to learn the locations of flooding hotspots to determine how to improve flood drainage in the future.
Common Ground, a local advocacy group, has also been critical of MMSD.
The organization's concerns come after whistleblower accusations of employee mistreatment and wastewater mismanagement. On Monday, the commission that oversees MMSD authorized an audit of the District and Veolia, the company that runs its two wastewater treatment plants.
As for the flood task force, Crowley says its immediate goal is to present its next steps to the community. At a future meeting, Shafer says the task force will provide an opportunity for public input.
