County Could Pay For Old Loomis Road Repair, After Rejecting State Funding

Old Loomis Road. Photo by Graham Kilmer.

The Milwaukee County Board is poised to have the county pay for repairs to Old Loomis Road after scuttling the project two years ago when it had state funding.

In 2021, Milwaukee County Parks sought board approval of an engineering contract for the reconstruction of Old Loomis Road. The Milwaukee County Department of Transportation (MCDOT) had secured grant funding from the state that would have paid for a full reconstruction of the short stretch of road that is also a connection to the Oak Leaf Trail. But supervisors refused to approve the contract, blocking the project from moving forward.

Then-supervisors John Weishan, Jr. and Joe Czarnezki and current Sup. Patti Logsdon led a charge against the project. Weishan suggested that the parks department wanted to repair the road for the benefit of the nearby The Rock Sportsplex and Ballpark Commons development. Czarnezki suggested that a nearby municipality may take it over if the county refused to fix it.

Now, Sup. Kathleen Vincent has authored a resolution that would use $225,000 from the county’s rainy day fund for a mill and overlay repair of the road, which involves taking off the top layer and repaving it. Logsdon and Sup. Tony Staskunas are now both co-sponsors of the resolution despite both voting against the engineering contract two years ago. Staskunas, in 2021, did try to persuade his colleagues not to kill the project before ultimately joining them in a unanimous vote against it.

The project once again has the support of both parks and MCDOT. “These are not potholes. These are craters,” MCDOT director Donna Brown-Martin told the board’s Committee on Transportation and Transit. “We are missing whole slabs of concrete, whole slabs of asphalt. Some of them are jagged. We don’t have any underfill.”

She echoed Vincent’s comments that the road has become a safety concern. “I started five years ago and this was an issue five years ago,” Brown-Martin said. “I did get us some money then, but that’s neither here nor there now.”

Seasonal erosion is only making the road worse, she said. “MCDOT will handle this,” she said, if the board approves Vincent’s resolution. The department will use its own road crews, instead of a private contractor, and repair the top surface of the road. She said the county could get another 10 years out of the road. That should be enough time to get back in line for the competitive grant funding that MCDOT secured last time around for a full reconstruction of the road.

If the full board approves the project, MCDOT could repair the road by the end of fall, saving it from another year of being torn up by snow plows, Brown-Martin said.

Supervisors asked how this road ranked in priority compared to the many other roads in the county needing repair. Brown-Martin said that this project is smaller and cheaper than many of the other road projects the county has on its plate. “This one is less than a third of a mile,” she said. “It’s quick fast and something that I can go in and get done.”

The transit committee voted unanimously in favor of funding the project. But the resolution did not make it out of the Finance Committee when it went before it in May, and it heads there again this month.

The road, split between Greendale and Franklin, runs from S. Hollow Lane. southwest to S. 76th Street.