When the lights went out on Milwaukee freeways, intentionally
For about three weeks in October 1980, Milwaukee's highways went dark. On purpose.
Faced with a projected $26 million fiscal-year shortfall in the state transportation budget, DOT Secretary Lowell Jackson announced in September plans to cut spending department-wide by 7%, including turning off the lights on freeways from Oct. 1 through Dec. 1, and again after April 1, the Milwaukee Sentinel reported on Sept. 19, 1980.
Lighting for interchanges, tunnels, park-and-ride lots and directional signs wasn't to be affected. The lights would stay on during winter months to help with plowing, the Sentinel reported.
The plan, expected to save the state $300,000, hit hardest in Milwaukee County, which had most of the affected freeways.
County officials raged at the decision. "To jeopardize someone's life to make a point is a hell of a way to do it.," Supervisor Dan Cupertino Jr. told the Sentinel.
The first Sunday night with the lights out, Cupertino and Inspector William Klamm of the Milwaukee County Sheriff's Department took a late-night ride to see for themselves. Klamm, who served as sheriff from 1981-'83, said he was particularly alarmed by the darkness on the Hoan and High Rise bridges.
On the Hoan Bridge, Klamm told the Sentinel's Chester Sheard in a story published Oct. 6, it was impossible to see across the divider on the six-lane highway.
"If it is this bad for the regular travelers of these roads, imagine what it will be like for strangers," Klamm said.
On Oct. 7, County Supervisor John J. Valenti filed a lawsuit asking the state be ordered to turn the lights back on, alleging Jackson had acted "capriciously to create an extremely dangerous and hazardous condition in the most populous county in the state," according to an Oct. 8 Sentinel story.
Madison seemed unmoved. At a press conference on Oct. 9, Dreyfus said turning off the lights actually had some benefits.
"People will be more alert," he said, according to a story in the Oct. 10 Milwaukee Journal. "They will watch their speeds more because they are now not deluded to believe that they are operating really for practical purposes in daytime traffic."
The Journal's Joan M. Biskupic reported on Oct. 17 that a Menomonee Falls man sued Milwaukee County for damages after his son struck a deer while driving on Highway 175, one of the roads that went dark.
"A deer would not have been crossing the highway had it been lit," the man's attorney told Biskupic.
In an Oct. 20 hearing on the lawsuit filed by Valenti, Milwaukee County Circuit Judge John McCormick ruled that the DOT would have to show the decision to turn off the lights didn't harm public safety.
It never came to that. That same day, Dreyfus decided to turn the lights back on.
In a front-page Journal story on Oct. 21, William Kraus, the governor's director of communications, said Dreyfus had not been sleeping well since the original decision.
"The safety issue … has troubled him," Kraus said. "He just doesn't think the risk value is worth it."
Dreyfus got the last chuckle out of it all. At an Oct. 24 Republican fundraising dinner at the MECCA convention center with Republican vice presidential candidate George H.W. Bush, Dreyfus was jokingly introduced as the man who got the freeway lights turned on, The Journal reported the next day.