Park Place

The staff at the Park People office received a number of calls last Thursday morning from concerned citizens who apparently choked on their Cheerios while reading Charlie Sykes’ column “Parks Proposal Benefits Everyone” in their MyCommunityNOW newspaper. It seems that County Executive Scott Walker has finally found a voice in the wilderness to assist in his rationalization of the accelerated destruction of the Milwaukee County Park System. On the surface, Sykes’ regurgitation of Walker’s attribution of clear thinking sounds plausible, but when looked at in the context of its effect on the park system it is exposed for what it is – irresponsible.

Sykes’ attempt to lend credence to the swap of competent full-time employees for more seasonal employee hours may sound rational to his general audience but doesn’t pass muster when confronted with reality. While seasonal employees are a valued and important part of the staff of the Parks Department, this proposed switch to an even greater dependence on these “here today, gone tomorrow” employees will lead to a further decline in our once vibrant park system for the following reasons:

- Seasonal employees require copious hours of training before they are effective. In fact, nearly all of their training is currently conducted by a full-time Park Maintenance Worker, the same position that is proposed to be cut. The responsibility for competent training will fall to a greatly reduced force of full-time employees who will be asked to train an even higher number of these transitional employees. This is a recipe for further dysfunction.

- These temporary staffers require much more supervision than dedicated full-time staffers. In keeping with the continual reduction in field staff, the supervisory ranks are at an all-time low and struggle to keep a watchful eye on their charges while keeping up with their myriad other duties. A good work force is one that has a stake in providing a quality product while keeping on task. With an even greater dependence on a transitional workforce that has no real stake in the operation, creating that “buy-in” is a harder sell and keeping them on task over the long term is a wish.

- Because of low wages and lack of benefits a high percent of seasonal employees are college and high school students who are not available during the school year. This is especially problematic during the early- to late-fall period when park personnel have the task of mending the hundreds of athletic fields that were tortured during the main sporting season. Local sports enthusiasts have already taken note that their “fields of dreams” have turned into nightmares over the last number of years due to lack of maintenance. This bad dream will only be exacerbated by this further reduction of available, competent full-time staffers.

The list could go on, but with some consideration for brevity, it should be noted that this trend towards a seasonal work force is nothing new. In the mid-‘70s there were more than 1,100 full-time employees staffing our parks. In the mid-‘80s the number had dropped to a still reasonable 760. This year, the number of full-time staffers is about 260 able bodies.

The Parks Department deserves to be complimented for developing the efficiencies necessary to keep our parks in fairly decent shape during this decline. For many, it may appear that there is nothing wrong with this proud department, but those with a good memory can point to a number of unfortunate consequences that have resulted from this loss of full-time staff due to budget reductions.

Winter recreational opportunities have dwindled. The parks now offer only one groomed cross-country ski trail where once it offered four. Ice skating rinks have been reduced from more than 60 to a bare handful. Both of these reductions are because of staffing cuts.

Summer picnics have suffered because of a gross lack of maintenance to the parks’ fleet of picnic tables, which number in the thousands. These tables were constructed and maintained by full-time staffers during the winter months. While some new steel-leg replacements were built a few years back, the bulk of this fleet are the older wooden-leg models that were built as long as 25 years ago and are in dire need of some loving care. They will not get it because of the reduction of full-time staff.

Building maintenance has suffered. Winter maintenance has suffered. Many park paths do not get plowed or salted anymore.

You get the picture….

The bottom line is that if you truly value a quality park system and believe that the spiral of reductions to our once-envied Milwaukee County Parks Department should stop, here and now, don’t listen to the weak rationalizations of Charlie Sykes. After all, he is merely toting water for his own personal county executive, Scott Walker.

One of the greatest legacies left to us by the men and women who built Milwaukee into a modern city is the extensive and well-designed park system they created.

Milwaukee was the first city in America to adopt the “greenbelt” concept of establishing parklands along all its major waterways to serve both as floodways and natural recreational corridors – the system we know as our parkways, the routes followed by most of our bike paths.

This was accomplished during the 1930s; other cities did not recognize the wisdom of establishing greenbelts until the 1970s and later.

With more than 150 parks and parkways encompassing 15,000 acres, Milwaukee County offers more open spaces and natural areas than does Chicago.

Unfortunately, our impressive park system is now in trouble. Since 1982, when the County Board of Supervisors and the County Executive dissolved the Park Commission that built this system and took over responsibility for the parks budget, deep annual funding cuts have left the Parks Department an empty shell.

In adjusted dollars, the parks budget is now less than two-thirds what it was 25 years ago. In constant dollars, it is only about half. And more cuts are planned for next year. The parks staff has been cut from more than 1100 full time workers in the early 1970’s to just over 260 – barely sufficient for proper park maintenance.

The Park People was founded in 1978 by former Parks Commissioner Joy Teschner to advocate for our park system. She clearly foresaw the danger of taking this public treasure out of the hands of an independent commission of volunteer citizens and placing it in the political realm.

The Park People has responded by forming more than 36 individual park Friends Groups to take stewardship of their neighborhood parks. The Park People also has proposed legislation to return to an independent citizens’ commission to govern the parks through the creation of a separate Park District.

Our goal is to ultimately create a network of 150 Friends Groups numbering 10,000 or more concerned citizens to protect every park in the system and to demand adequate funding and staffing for all our parks.

We will be posting regularly on this site about issues affecting our parks and the efforts of Milwaukee County residents to rebuild and revitalize this precious legacy. Sometimes, we’ll tell you a feel-good story about how people have stepped forward to raise money and awareness for their park’s needs. We might share a bit of the history of some our less well-known parks, such as Franklin Park, one of three designated state natural areas in Milwaukee County.

But sometimes, we’re going to stick a pin in our elected officials, demanding to know why our tremendous park system has been allowed to deteriorate and what in the world is taking them so long to do something about it.

Through the Park Department’s own admission, our parks system has come to have incurred more than $150 million in “deferred maintenance” – the crumbling infrastructure of rutted roads, impassable parking lots, locked-up and leaking restrooms, empty swimming pools, historic pavilions that need new roofs and boilers. We’ll point the finger at the people who have let the capital budget for these needed repairs stand at unsustainable levels for far too many years.

We want you to know what we’ve got out there and why it’s worth saving. We want you to share our pride in the foresight that led Milwaukee to create a park system that has been the envy of other cities across the country. And we want you to share our concern that this heirloom is threatened and that public officials have been so slow to move to protect it.

We want you to become a Friend of the Parks. Stay tuned.


If you have a question about the parks that you would like answered or have an issue you would like us to address, please use the Park People link above to send us an email. This address can also be used for information on how to start or join a friends group or become a member of The Park People.