Parks Seeks Sponsors for Free Admission Days

Mitchell Park Domes’ Tropical Dome. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

Milwaukee County Parks is looking for sponsors for monthly admission-free days at the county’s three horticultural institutions: Wehr Nature Center, the Mitchell Park Domes and Boerner Botanical Gardens.

The tentative plan, explained Andrea Wallace, assistant director of business services, is to make these institutions free on the final Thursday of each month in 2024. Boerner Botanical Gardens, though, would be just during the garden season from May to August. “But we are open to different ideas,” Wallace said. Parks estimates that approximately 300,000 people visit these facilities every year.

The main goal is to open up access to these facilities for families that may find admission costs prohibitive. The county-resident admission at these facilities ranges from $6 for children to $9 for adults.

The department is seeking a sponsor for the free days, as opposed to just unilaterally making them free, because it runs on an incredibly tight budget with limited support from the county’s tax levy. In 2022, approximately 60% of the department’s operating budget came from fees, rentals and other revenue-generating services throughout the system. The revenue generated at the Mitchell Park Domes already isn’t even enough to cover the facility’s annual costs.

The department recently began soliciting sponsors and is open to multiple organizations sponsoring the days. Parks is offering potential sponsors a deal that involves a number of free tickets for use throughout the year, name and logo placement and media exposure. The department is open to in-kind exchange of services for the sponsorship and monetary sponsorship, Wallace said. The sponsorship deal can also be routed through the Milwaukee Parks Foundation so that it is considered a charitable donation, Wallace said.

“This is a new endeavor for us to try and pair all three of our horticultural sites together,” Wallace said. ” We have done some free days at Boerner, that have been sponsored independently or at The Domes that have been sponsored independently pre-COVID, but we wanted to put all three horticultural centers at the forefront, you know, in order to showcase them and be able to offer all three rather than one individually.”