The Tire Bounty Is Back

Tires. (CC0 Public Domain)

Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow on Monday and, if he had been in Milwaukee, he might have also spotted illegally dumped tires.

The rest of the country celebrated Groundhog Day on Monday, but those at Milwaukee City Hall chose Tuesday for a kind of celebration. Like Bill Murray in the 1993 film, city officials appear to be in an endless loop about what to do with illegally dumped tries.

For at least six years, Alderman Robert Bauman has been offering a solution: pay a bounty.

He first floated the idea in 2019 and again in 2023. Now, he might have a new ally in getting it implemented.

“It was recently in the news, 300 tires dumped at the Cousin’s on Villard,” said Alderwoman Andrea Pratt during Tuesday’s Zoning, Neighborhoods & Development Committee meeting. “It’s an on-going issue.”

The city can fine people caught dumping tires, but “trying to enforce this ordinance,” Bauman contended, “is basically a game of whack-a-mole. Because it’s almost impossible to catch people in the act; if we do, it’s pure luck.”

“Rather than charging people to dispose of tires, pay them to bring them in,” he urged his colleagues. Under his proposed solution, a per-tire fee would be paid at the city’s two drop-off centers. Currently, up to five tires can be dropped off for free.

Bauman admits the idea would have a cost for the Department of Public Works, which manages the drop-off centers, but he says it would have a clear public benefit in reducing litter and it could reduce cleanup costs incurred by the Department of Neighborhood Services.

“Keep that in mind for when we come around to the budget again,” said Bauman.

Perhaps unintentionally, every time Bauman floats the idea the bounty grows. In 2019 he proposed 50 cents per tire. In 2023 it rose to $1. On Tuesday it was $2 or $3.

“You see very few aluminum cans laying around anymore because they can be converted to cash,” he noted.

Department of Neighborhood Services Commissioner Jezamil Arroyo-Vega said her department would provide a more detailed briefing on what it does to enforce the city’s waste tire ordinance at a future meeting.

In 2019, then-alderman Nik Kovac supported Bauman’s bounty push and asked DPW to come up with a cost estimate. As the budget director, he’s now in the position to analyze the numbers and just perhaps, clear the way to a city with less tires getting dumped.

At the time of the 2019 debate, sanitation services manager Rick Meyers said the city pays $2 to $3 per tire in disposal costs. The total, at the time, was approximately $150,000 per year.

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