Maintaining the Oak Leaf Trail and the Parks Budget

Every morning, Oak Leaf Trail Supervisor Jessica Wineberg checks the issue reporter to see if there are major safety issues to address before planning the rest of her day. 

Milwaukee County has more than 150 parks and more than 135 miles on the Oak Leaf Trail, and the maintenance required and staff needed vary from season to park.

Maintenance can include removing fallen trees, filling in sinkholes, plowing snow, rebuilding staircases, or trimming back overgrown areas. 

“The biggest challenge is that we have a very big park system. And our budget has just been going down year after year,” said Wineberg. “And so we’re continually doing more with less.”

The Milwaukee County Parks Department has around 200 full-time employees; four of those tend to the 135-mile Oak Leaf Trail, which traverses the entire county.  

The department has experienced a steady reduction in its full-time workforce since the 1980s and has relied on seasonal employees to maintain the parks, according to County Executive David Crowley’s budget address. 

Summer, spring, and fall are the busy times when the parks department hires seasonal employees, such as UWM student Julia Bartram, who worked as a seasonal Oak Leaf Trail employee between August and December in 2022.  

“As seasonals, we were just there until the money ran out,” said Bartram. 

Bartram studies conservation and environmental science at UWM, and the work helped her learn more about the region.

“I am not from the area and so getting out of the house was kind of how I learned about Milwaukee and the Oak Leaf Trail and how big it is and how it connects so many parts of the city,” said Bartram.

The Oak Leaf Trail includes seven branches, or lines, and two scenic loops and two east to west connecting paths to other lines.  

Bartram says when she’s working on the Oak Leaf Trail she’ll see people running, rollerblading, families with little children and people walking dogs.

“It’s really really cool that everyone has the space to enjoy it however they want to,” said Bartram. 

 

The Effect of Green Space in Urban Areas 

The challenges in the parks department budget reflect a broader debate about how to allocate scarce funds.

“We have a ton of data to show that you know things like mean spaces having pools open, those things reduce crime in a way that having, you know, a police state doesn’t,” said Milwaukee County Supervisor Ryan Clancy, who represents Milwaukee County’s 4th District and Wisconsin’s 19th District in the Wisconsin State Assembly.

A 2022 study by the University of Edinburgh found “more urban green space in a neighborhood was consistently and significantly associated with reduced risk of both violent and property crime.” 

The study looked at 301 U.S. cities with a population over 100,000, which includes Milwaukee. Urban green space was defined as “any type of plant covered environment located within a city and a key component of the city landscape.” 

The researchers took into account the amount of green space in a city, broke it up into counties and then census tracts in the neighborhood. They factored in other variables of crime such as “sociodemographic variations, disadvantage risk, diversity index of a city, police force, GPD, and climate type.” 

Green space also has an effect on health. 

A 2022 study done by researchers from Aurora Advocate Health Care in Milwaukee found people with access to green spaces were 19% less likely to have a stroke than those not living near green spaces. 

The study used satellite images to determine the amount of green space in a neighborhood.  

Urban Milwaukee reports the study found that non-Hispanic Black residents in Milwaukee live in areas with less access to green space. 

Expansion Projects on the Oak Leaf Trail 

Wineberg works with community partners to plan new sections of the Oak Leaf to increase equity in trail use and access to underserved areas. 

“The Oak Leaf Trail is kind of like a big circle around the county, but now we really want to look inside of the circle of the trail and see how we can close gaps and bring it to more diverse communities in an equitable way,” said Wineberg. 

Closing the gaps includes expanding on the Northwest side of the trail. 

“It’s a very long process to build a new section of the Oak Leaf Trail,” said Wineberg. 

In addition to closing gaps in underserved areas of the Oak Leaf Trail, the parks department would like to shut down sections of roads to make pedestrian only areas within parks.

Wineberg also wants to develop the Oak Leaf Trail along the Kinnickinnic River Parkway. 

This proposed plan involves closing the small sections of the Lincoln Creek Parkway and the Little Menomonee River Parkway to cars. 

Closing the street to cars would allow residents to walk or bike on the road safely, Wineberg said. 

“It’s tough to ride a bike in many places in the city and in the county, because we have built our space around cars rather than, you know, people walking and biking through parks,” said Clancy. 

Wineberg says these plans are not funded. 

 

Funding at the County and State Level 

In 2021, a Wisconsin Policy Forum report outlined the financial problems the parks have been facing. It found that the county should be spending $39 million annually to repair and replace park assets. 

In 2017, the county budget for the parks department was roughly $40 million. In 2018, the budget was around $34.6 million. 

From 2018-2021, the budget has been below the Wisconsin Policy Forum recommended $39 million. 

“We are simply not giving the Parks Department enough money, even to keep up with their maintenance, much less to expand or to have new things going on,” said Clancy. “And that has nothing to do with the parks department. They do a great job with what they have, but we’re not giving them enough.”

The 2022 county budget put roughly $40 million towards the parks department. The 2023 county parks budget is $43,162,688. 

The revenue from the county parks department is projected to increase by $1.1 million, according to County Executive David Crowley’s budget address. That revenue comes from things like golf course fees and beer gardens.

“There’s kind of an institutional protection for the ways that we spend money like on the sheriff’s office. And there’s unfortunately a tendency to always put something like parks on the chopping block,” said Clancy. 

The Wisconsin Forum Policy report states that if the Milwaukee County Parks department does not receive more funding from the state by 2027, some Milwaukee County Parks may need to be dismantled. 

Crowley’s budget address corroborates this report. 

He writes that due to a state aid remaining stagnant in the past decades, Milwaukee County will not have enough money to fund services that are not mandated, or deemed essential by the state. 

This includes “public safety, parks, bus routes, emergency services, arts, senior services, disability services, and youth services.”

“It’s so much easier to find new dollars for new programs,” said Clancy. “Nobody wants to put money into, you know, repairing a roof on a park building, when there are all these other kinds of bright, flashy things that demand people’s attention.” 

Clancy says parks are important parts of a community, that they provide an outlet for Milwaukee residents to connect with nature and others in their community. Whether that be at one of the many Beer Gardens located on the Oak Leaf Trail or in parks, or even the Summerfest music festival. 

“When you talk to people about the community they want to live in, I have yet to talk to anybody who’s like, ‘I love that there are police everywhere,’” said Clancy. “You often hear people saying things about the recreation opportunities that we’re able to provide or festivals or the times that they can interact with their community and nature. And I think parks really encapsulates a lot of those.”