Parks Rethinking Its Building Portfolio

Doyne Park. Photo taken Aug. 21, 2022 by Dave Reid.

The Milwaukee County Parks system is dotted with unused, and in some cases broken, buildings and infrastructure. And Parks would like to look into getting rid of some of these assets, potentially freeing up funds for investment elsewhere in the system.

James Tarantino, deputy parks director, said these “underutilized assets” include wading pools that no longer work, bathroom facilities that haven’t been opened in years and “dozens and dozens of buildings throughout the park system.” Many of these buildings, despite being empty and unused for years, are still heated in the winter to keep the pipes from freezing, he said.

The parks system does not get a dedicated portion of the county’s property tax levy, nor does it receive annual operating assistance from the state. The system has had to put a particular focus on money-making services in recent years in order to generate enough revenue to keep the system afloat. Parks now generates more than 50% of its annual operating revenue through fees for services and amenities, like golf courses and facility rentals.

The system has a massive backlog of maintenance and infrastructure projects with an estimated price tag of half a billion dollars, and the department has set itself a goal of reducing the backlog by $1 million annually. But if the department were to keep pace with its maintenance backlog, it would need to spend more than $40 million a year on these projects.

The department has been aggressive about maintaining parkland in public trust, even facing off against some of the county’s wealthier, and politically connected residents over a single bluff in 2022. But the department would like to develop a plan for beginning to eliminate some of the infrastructure that currently sits on its books as deferred maintenance.

Parks is maintaining and repairing these unused buildings and infrastructure in the hopes that they be used again in the future. “We devoted 82% of our major maintenance fund to deferred maintenance,” Tarantino said of 2022. “So that’s 82% of the funding we have to improve the parks system on an annual operating basis went to fixing what was broken.” Though, not all of that funding is going toward infrastructure that is unused, vacant or underutilized.

Still, the general approach of the system was described this way by Tarantino: “We are extremely reactive.”

He used trails and paths as an example while explaining this dynamic to the board’s Committee on Health Equity, Human Needs and Strategic Planning at its meeting last week. “We could prioritize our operating funds on improving pathways. But really what we do is end up fixing where there are sinkholes, where there’s broken infrastructure underground that causes a path or a parking lot to cave in.”

The department would like to “get our arms around our portfolio” and develop a plan for beginning to remove some of its unused infrastructure.

“We just want an honest look at how that is impacting our ability to invest in anything new as we maintain what’s old,” Tarantino told supervisors. “And we will need more political support from you all as we as we work on that.”

While county government as a whole has reduced its building footprint over the last decade in the face of fiscal pressures, “the same can’t be said of the parks department,” he said.

Sup. Sheldon Wasserman, chair of the Committee on Parks and Culture, said you can ride your bike through parks all over the county and see these abandoned, padlocked buildings. The supervisor added that he thought there could be community support for taking some of them down if it meant long-term savings could be plugged into programming for the community.