DIRE STRAITS
County’s maintenance backlog for parks now ‘seemingly insurmountable,’ report says
Milwaukee County officials are not making progress on reducing the evergrowing to-do list of costly building and road repair or replacement projects they face at public parks, recreational sites and other cultural assets, a new report says.
The county now faces “a seemingly insurmountable backlog” of tens of millions of dollars worth of deferred maintenance, and lacks the resources to make headway in paring it down, the Wisconsin Policy Forum warns in the report.
If this was football, the county would be penalized for “Delay of Game” and that is the title of the nonpartisan forum’s report released Friday.
In the real world, however, “the penalty for delaying solutions could be far more severe,” Wisconsin Policy Forum president Rob Henken said.
The threat of a growing backlog is that some assets would continue to deteriorate to the extent that use of the properties down the road could be limited, he said.
“This report illustrates several of the challenges we have in Milwaukee County with regards to our infrastructure,” Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele
said. “Our county parks alone have built up more than $200 million in deferred maintenance.”
To help deal with the backlog and other budget problems, Abele and County Board officials intend to ask the state to increase shared revenue payments to counties and to authorize counties to establish new revenue sources.
“We’re working to build a coalition throughout our community and across Wisconsin to create a state funding solution and address our biggest funding challenges,” Abele said.
Forum researchers reviewed asset condition reports prepared by county departments and cultural institutions, such as the Mitchell Park Domes.
Among the report’s findings:
❚ The Domes are in poor condition with up to $30 million in deferred repairs.
❚ Fully 16.5 miles of county parkways — more than 26 percent of the total 63 miles of parkways — need immediate reconstruction while an additional 29 miles need reconstruction within the next decade.
❚ About 39 percent of county parking lots should be reconstructed immediately while an additional 46 percent need reconstruction in the next two to 10 years.
❚ About 12 percent of the 108 miles of park walkways are in need of immediate reconstruction while an additional 65 percent will require reconstruction in the
“This report illustrates several of the challenges we have in Milwaukee County with regards to our infrastructure. Our county parks alone have built up more than $200 million in deferred maintenance.” Chris Abele, Milwaukee County executive
next two to 10 years.
❚ About 48 percent of the county’s 95 tennis courts and 54 percent of its 82 basketball courts need reconstruction within the next decade.
Daunting funding needs
To meet the requests from cultural institutions and parks for major repair and construction projects in 2019 alone, the county would need to more than double capital spending on cultural institutions, from $6.2 million to $13.9 million, and increase spending nearly tenfold on parks, from $2.4 million to $23 million, according to the report.
“Meeting all parks, recreation and cultural capital requests for the next four years would require a 135 percent increase in spending, from $82.6 million to $194.1 million, over budgeted spending of the past four years,” the report said.
Neither of those targets could be met under a long-standing and selfimposed county policy to limit borrowing each year with a goal of restraining the county’s total debt load.
The county issues bonds to generate revenue that pays for 80 percent of all major construction projects, Budget Director Joe Lamers said in discussing the policy.
To limit growth of debt from bonding, the policy requires that the remaining 20 percent of those capital projects be financed with cash and that money comes out of the annual property tax levy.
For 2019, the amount of cash-financed construction projects is estimated to be $10.9 million. So that much of the levy is not available to help pay costs to operate county programs.
Total bonding each year also is kept in check by limiting annual increases to 3 percent under the policy, Lamers said.
For 2019, the county could not issue more than $43.6 million in bonds for capital projects to comply with the policy.
Policymakers could remove the cap and increase total debt by an even larger amount each year.
But debt is repaid with a portion of the county’s property tax levy each year.
The more debt there is to repay, the greater the amount of tax levy needed for that purpose, prompting larger tax increases, Lamers said.
“It’s a real dilemma for the county,” Henken said. “To the extent you increase debt to take on a greater share of the backlog, you increase the tax levy” needed to repay the debt.
“For the county, the question is what can taxpayers afford?” he said.