Domes Plan Requires $30 Million From County

Proposed Nature Learning Center addition. Rendering courtesy Friends of the Domes.

Milwaukee County Supervisors will decide over the coming weeks whether to move forward with a funding commitment for the restoration and redevelopment of the Mitchell Park Domes and Horticultural Conservatory.

County policymakers spent roughly a decade looking for a way to repair the increasingly dilapidated Domes. The problem for the county was always about finding a way to pay it. In 2024, The Milwaukee Domes Alliance, formerly known as the Friends of the Domes, received approval for an ambitious $133 million plan to save the Domes and the conservatory from eventual demolition.

The plan to save the Domes, called Domes Reimagined, was created in partnership with Milwaukee County Parks and called for a $30 million commitment from the county. The rest would be fundraised. Parks is coming to the board this month seeking supervisors’ support to include an initial installment in the 2026 capital budget on its $30 million commitment.

It is the first approval in a series of approvals that will not end until the project is complete. But, without it, the project will not advance. The Domes Alliance and Parks are finishing negotiations for the development agreement. If the board approves the initial funding in July, the development agreement will go before them in September.

While the details of the development agreement are still subject to negotiation, the plan originally called for splitting the $30 million county contribution into six annual installments of $5 million.

“We are very close to reaching a final iteration of that, but we don’t quite have it ready,” said Christa Beall Diefenbach, executive director of the Milwaukee Domes Alliance.

The project involves the redevelopment of all three domes, the lobby, gift shop and improvements to the surrounding park. The domes will be repaired and restored one at a time. That’s the first phase. The second phase of the plan involves the development of a new $27 million nature learning center and stormwater garden replacing the sunken gardens. The Domes Alliance plans to cover the full cost of the second phase.

Development is predicated on significant support from the philanthropic community. For every $1 the county puts in, the Domes Alliance is looking to raise an additional $3.7. Diefenbach declined to say how much they’ve raised, but said  “we have had some very early wins.”

To do all this, the Domes Alliance will sign a longterm lease with the county, taking ownership of the Domes and responsibility for all maintenance and operations costs. Once the Domes are no longer the county’s responsibility, the county will save an estimated $770,000 annually, according to a June report drafted by Parks Deputy Director Jim Tarantino.

In the meantime, though, the county’s Domes payments will crowd out spending on other projects around the parks system. The department has a limited amount of funding to spend on infrastructure each year. The plan is to carve the Domes payments out of that pool of funding, not to add it on top.

“So, what this request is basically saying is, every year, for the next six years, there is $5 million less of capital projects going to take place within the park system,” said Sup. Steve Taylor, who chairs the Capital Improvements Committee, the ad-hoc body that develops a list of infrastructure recommendations that inform the county executive’s annual budget proposal.

The board could always vote to exceed the county’s annual debt limit by $5 million, he conceded, but that would hit the county’s operating budget as more cash is needed to pay down the debt, he added.

The county has a five-year list of infrastructure needs estimated at $1.1 billion, and nowhere near enough funding to pay for it all. Roughly half of all of that is in the parks system. The county is also looking at dwindling county services in the coming years, as budget deficits strip departments of operating funds. The government faces an estimated $46.7 million budget deficit in 2026 and County Executive David Crowley has directed department heads, including parks, to plan for 10% across-the-board budget cuts.

These challenges, though, are the motivations for the Domes project, not reasons to abandon it, according to Diefenbach. The county’s “very serious fiscal crisis” led to the disinvestment, and a “downward spiral” of conditions at the Domes, bringing them “far closer to demolition than I think many people in our community would feel comfortable with,” Diefenbach said.

“We have a very well vetted operating pro-forma that shows that we can operate in a sustainable fashion, and that this project is the most fiscally responsible solution for the county,” Diefenbach said.

The Domes Reimagined plan is designed to make them self-sufficient so that they can stand on their own without annual support from the county. The plan suggests a future for major parks assets: new solutions for maintaining and funding them long-term will be needed, and that could mean more partnerships between the government and private-sector organizations.

The board spent June deliberating over a public-private project in McGovern Park before rejecting it. The Crowley administration proposed working with a private developer, Jewish Family Services (JFS), to build a new, modern senior center with 30 to 55 affordable housing units on the floors above. Other than a $2 million federal affordable housing grant, JFS would have financed the entire project.

Opponents were worried about the parkland. Supporters were more worried about the senior center and Milwaukee’s housing crisis. The affordable housing component, ultimately, proved too much for a majority of the board to stomach.

The coming together of public and private entities is one of the few things the Domes and McGovern have in common. But the board’s decision to reject the project created a new challenge, especially within the parks system budget. Having rejected the administration’s Hail Mary to save the McGovern Senior Center at no cost to the taxpayer, supervisors face a new pressure to find an alternative solution.

If they don’t, the senior center will eventually be shuttered, according to the administration. Conservative estimates suggest it would cost nearly $2 million just to fix the foundation. Demolition by neglect, insurmountable costs: those are the same problems that dogged discussion of the Domes. There it took a decade to find a solution, and it remains to be seen if it will work.

After McGovern

Sup. Juan Miguel Martinez, whose district encompasses the Domes and who voted against the senior center proposal, admits the McGovern vote changed the political landscape for major projects. He stands by his vote to kill the senior center project, because for him it was about protecting public land. But the whole ordeal revealed the county’s “weak spots” and “the reality as to what we can and cannot fund,” he said.

The supervisor hopes the McGovern vote won’t have altered the political possibilities for the Domes, but said, “I gotta be realistic and say that maybe it will.”

Over the next five years, while supervisors are approving annual Domes installments, the county will have approximately $1 billion in infrastructure needs and only $375 million in funding to pay for them, according to the Office of Strategy, Budget and Performance.

“We had a clear financial plan for the Domes, and I’m just hoping that, since it passed, everybody will want to vote for it and make sure that that one keeps moving forward,” Martinez said. “And I’m not saying back burner the McGovern Senior Center or anything like that, but we have this clear plan for the Domes, and I’m hoping that the supervisors will want to stick to it.”

Nothing has changed for Martinez, though. The colleagues he has spoken to still support the Domes project and he’s committed to “charging forward” and making sure the project gets done.

Taylor, given to lecturing his colleagues about the county budget, hasn’t changed either. Except he thinks now, more than ever, that some of his colleagues don’t understand the county’s finances. He voted to support the senior center project. And while he’s not opposing the Domes funding, he’s not a yes vote, yet, either.

“I don’t think they truly understand how dire a situation we’re in,” he said. “And do I really want to go down a path committing another 30 million dollars when some of these same people make short sighted decisions, like I think they did on McGovern?”

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