Great Lakes Funding Critical To County Parks

Milwaukee and Lake Michigan. Photo by Graham Kilmer.

A crucial support for environmental cleanup in Milwaukee — and the Milwaukee County Parks system — is getting bipartisan backing and a new life.

The Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI) was created in 2009 and represents a massive investment in the ecological health of the Great Lakes region. One of the primary functions of the initiative is to funnel money to local governments and non-profits working to clean so-called “Areas of Concern” designated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

A bill reauthorizing the program from 2027 to 2031 was recently introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives. It has bipartisan support, including co-sponsorship from Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI) and Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI). A companion bill was passed by the U.S. Senate in December 2024 with bipartisan support and sponsorship, including U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin.

GLRI funding has proven critical to Milwaukee, which has 41 projects that need to be completed before it is no longer considered an Area of Concern (AOC) by the EPA.

One of the local agencies tackling AOC projects is Milwaukee County Parks. Parks isn’t alone. Many local state and federal agencies, as well as local nonprofits, are working on such projects in Milwaukee.

“It’s a huge effort,” said Natalie Dutack, Parks AOC program supervisor. “It’s a huge multi-partner effort.”

GLRI funding is particularly important for the county parks system. The department is notoriously cash-strapped, with an estimated maintenance backlog in the neighborhood of $500 million. Without GLRI funding the department would not be able to take these projects on, Dutack said.

The local institutions tackling AOC projects could not have taken on the whole effort single-handedly. That’s particularly true for Parks: all of its AOC funding has come from the GLRI. To date, the department has received approximately $13.8 million. The majority of the funding has been used to construct a new beach in South Shore Park and on habitat restoration in the Little Menomonee River Parkway. But a number of other projects are being planned, including habitat restoration in Kohl Park.

In South Shore Park, GLRI funding is allowing parks to reconstruct South Shore Beach, which is regularly one of the worst beaches in the nation for pollution and frequently closed for E. Coli. Bird droppings, sewer overflows and stormwater runoff create an environment where the beach is almost constantly being polluted by something.

The beach is being moved 500 feet south, nearer to the breakwater leading out to the rest of the lake. It will have a steeper grade with a larger grain of sand. All of this to improve water quality and allow local residents to use their beach more often, providing a tangible improvement to local quality of life, Dutack said.

The GLRI funding for the South Shore Beach project, and others, is routed through the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR), which helps parks develop the scope of the projects and the funding applications.

The DNR facilitates AOC projects across the state in this way. The Milwaukee AOC is a “mega-area of concern,” according to Brennan Dow,  the DNR’s AOC coordinator for the Milwaukee Estuary and Sheboygan River. The estuary includes the Milwaukee, Menomonee and Kinnickinnic rivers and many more tributary streams. And the GLRI has been “extremely critical” to a lot of the work done in the AOC, Dow said.

Not all of the projects are GLRI funded. The major sediment remediation projects — cleaning up PCBs and other carcinogens — have been conducted with funding from the Great Lakes Restoration Act.

Many of the projects Parks is taking on are focused on habitat restoration.

“With all of this industry, along with the contamination that came, the other thing was habitat loss,” Dutack said.

Habitats can be lost to invasive species overtaking the native plants relied upon by local wildlife, or to pollution and development. Working in the field of habitat restoration can be “demoralizing,” Dutack said. Yet sometimes a little pocket of native species survives and with GLRI funded projects, Dutack and others are helping these plants and wildlife keep their foothold and even grow.

In the Little Menomonee River Parkway, Parks has been working with neighbors to restore the native habitat, Durack said. Some of the neighbors have lived along the river their whole lives, remember playing in the parkway as a child. For decades buckthorn and other invasives have blocked their view of the river.

“For the first time in 30 years,” Dutack said, “they’re seeing the river again.”