State Awards $4.4 Million for Oak Leaf Trail Projects

Milwaukee County’s Oak Leaf Trail will receive a host of upgrades and new access points thanks to $4.4 million in state funding.

The majority of the funding is going toward three projects on the Oak Leaf Trail. These Milwaukee County Parks projects include general modernization of the Oak Leaf Trail ($2.6 million), a flood mitigation and sustainability project on the Root River section of the Oak Leaf Trail ($574,634) and a new Oak Leaf Trail access ramp to UW-Milwaukee ($1.3 million). The rest of the funding is going toward three other county projects, including updating the trail network plan ($128,000), planning for pedestrian and bicycle crossings ($115,200) and a Complete Communities planning project ($188,000).

The county was awarded the funds through the Transportation Alternatives Program (TAP), which is a grant program funded by the federal Department of Transportation (USDOT) but administered by the state’s Department of Transportation (WisDOT). These grants require a 20% match from local governments. The county’s total match on the projects will be approximately $995,000.

Jeremy Lucas, parks director of administration and planning, told Urban Milwaukee that the county has not yet allocated the matching funds for these projects and the department will have to go before the board in the near future to request these funds. The county has until 2026 to complete these projects, some of which are complicated infrastructure projects that will require coordination with other municipal governments and authorities, like the Metropolitan Milwaukee Sewerage District (MMSD), Lucas said.

Federal grants have proven an invaluable source of money for the parks department, which, like many county departments, has experienced decades of underfunding. The department has a capital project backlog estimated at somewhere around half a billion dollars. The department submitted a $44 million request for capital project funding in the 2023 budget to represent the investment the system needs. This amount of funding would nearly consume all of the county’s planned bonding. County Executive David Crowley included a handful of projects in his budget, totaling approximately $14.4 million.

UW-Milwaukee Connection

On the East Side, the parks department is planning the Hampshire Access Project. It’s a new ramp that would connect the Oak Leaf Trail to N. Cambridge Ave. two blocks north of E. Locust St. at E. Hampshire St. The street runs directly into UWM’s campus.

The idea is to provide a direct connection between the trail and the university. Currently, the nearest access points for university students and nearby residents are either south of E. Locust St. near the Urban Ecology Center and Riverside University High School or to the north near E. Providence Ave.

The UWM connection projection is also designed so that another Oak Leaf Trail project could piggyback on its funding. There are depressions and sinkholes forming along this section of the trail due to an old tunnel that runs directly underneath the trail. The access project would include repairs to the trail issues.

This project is the most complicated for the county on the list of those awarded TAP funding, given that the project involves a significant infrastructure development that connects to land under the authority of the City of Milwaukee and MMSD.

Flood Mitigation in Root River Parkway

A section of the Oak Leaf Trail in the Root River Parkway between W. Morgan Ave. and W. Howard Ave. routinely floods with up to a foot of water. The flooding is often between 10 and 50 feet in length and 100 feet wide, according to a parks department report, and it’s left the trail “degraded, cracked and sunken from sustained periods of standing water.” Changing weather patterns and nearby development are to blame, according to parks, as the trail was originally constructed decades ago and flooding is a relatively new problem.

Parks applied for TAP funding to realign approximately half a mile of trail out of the flood zone. The department previously estimated it would require approximately 2,300 new feet of trail.

Oak Leaf Modernization

There are more than a dozen sections of the Oak Leaf Trail that fall below modern standards for trail dimensions and construction and others where the infrastructure is downright failing, according to parks. The $2.6 million for modernization will fund projects that bring the trail “up to snuff” with modern standards, as Sarah Toomsen, parks manager of planning and development, previously explained.