New Buses, Courthouse Project Pushed For 2025 Budget

MCTS bus. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

While the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors is in recess for the month of August, the 2025 budget is already beginning to take shape.

During a meeting Monday of the county’s ad-hoc Capital Improvements Committee, policymakers, county officials and other local electeds began deliberating over some of the major policy priorities and infrastructure projects they believe should be included in the 2025 budget. The committee will create a list of recommendations for the county executive this month.

Sup. Shawn Rolland was the first out of the gate, proposing to reshuffle more than $20 million in projects by removing a $12 million building project in Washington Park and moving the funding to support new bus purchases and a road-to-trail project in his district.

The county has very limited funding for infrastructure projects and capital costs, like new buses. Statuatory limits on borrowing and revenue limitations leave the county with approximately $57 million to spend on these sorts of costs next year. Meanwhile, the list of eligible projects for this year includes approximately $139 million worth of items.

The county has a total backlog of infrastructure and capital needs that has been estimated at approximately $1 billion, with roughly half of that in the parks system. County policymakers are never able to fund everything that needs getting done in the annual budget, and needs are balanced against each other and have to make it through the political process of the Milwaukee County Board.

So while the board won’t begin budget deliberations until October, Rolland is already trying to influence the budget process, advocating for new buses and road repairs in his district.

“So it’s difficult to climb out of a billion dollar hole with a $55 million ladder,” Rolland told Urban Milwaukee after the meeting Monday. “And you know, over time, a lot of important projects have been delayed and delayed again, and one of those things is our purchasing buses.”

The transit system has lacked the funding it needs to keep up with bus replacement, and officials have watched the fleet go from 400 in 2018 to 321 in 2023. The system has managed to get up to above 370 buses this year, recently adding 28 new Gillig clean-diesel buses.

MCTS needs to purchase approximately 150 buses over the next five years to keep up with replacement. Buses typically reach the end of their life at around half-a-million miles of use.

“Our mechanics are doing God’s work keep them running, but I would say we can’t keep asking for miracles,” Rolland said. “We’re going to need money for buses.”

Rolland proposed using $5.28 million from a $12 million project to build a new service building in Washington Park for new bus purchases. With rising costs for bus manufacturing, MCTS now budgets for approximately $620,000 per bus, up from approximately $500,000 just a few years ago. Rolland’s proposal would cover the cost to purchase approximately eight new buses.

The second half of Rolland’s proposal seeks to move funding from the service building into a project rebuilding Underwood Creek Parkway. The $6.6 million reconstruction would convert a section of the parkway to a trail. “I am getting more feedback from constituents on that issue than any other,” Rolland said.

The committee opted not to vote on Rolland’s proposal, and will instead take it up at their next meeting. Joe Lamers, director of the Office of Performance, Strategy and Budget, said he would not support moving any new projects into the list of recommendations until general fleet replacements are funded. The count fleet includes all the non-bus vehicles county employees use to conduct the business of the government.

“We typically have an issue with our rankings and scoring whereby fleet and busses just don’t score well, because it’s not necessarily a life safety issue, but we really need to take account for our fleet and our bus related needs,” Lamers said.

The committee also grappled with how to keep the massive $488.4 million criminal courthouse project in the budget. Once completed the new building will replace the dilapidated Safety Building at 821 W. State Street.

The county has begun the very early stages of planning the project, for which momentum is key. In years past, Lamers pushed county policymakers to fund preliminary planning for the new building, noting that the county needs to make progress on the huge development project if it is ever going to attract state funding for it.

Stuart Carron, director of Facilities Management, told the committee that unless there is new funding in the 2025 budget, the project will come to a “screeching stop” in the middle of next year.

“Progress on the project would have to be temporarily stopped until we received 2026 funding and pick activities back up,” Carron said. 

The architecture and design consultants needed to design the building can’t be paid for with debt. The county has to pay cash for their work, and it only has a projected $11.4 million in cash financing for infrastructure projects next year. And the estimated cost to keep design chugging along is conservatively estimated at approximately $11 million.

Lamers suggested moving a nominal amount of cash-projects off the list in favor of continued courthouse planning, as a way for the committee to demonstrate support for the project. But this would not be a real funding solution, and would be predicated on policymakers finding funding elsewhere during the budget process to sustain the project.

“But if we want to do $11 million, we’d have to wipe out every single [cash-financed] project,” Lamers said.