Category Archives: City of Milwaukee

Those parking meters are failures

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The city’s new parking meters continue to suck.

I had to park at the library the other day. This meant a half a block hike to the parking kiosk. The street was covered with snow and there were big mounds on the edge of the sidewalk, making access to the walk difficult.

OK, for the many, many people who are frail or hurting but don’t qualify for or have a handicapped tag for their car, what are their options for getting to that kiosk? Just plow through the snow and slush on the street!

The good news: it was completely overcast, so I could actually read the kiosk screen. There are some days the screen is almost impossible to read because of glare from the sun. That’s OK, though, because the Department of Public Works likes the kiosks that are extremely difficult for some people to use during half the year and can’t be read by anyone on certain days. And as long as DPW is happy, we should all be happy.

The kiosk buttons were very, very difficult to push, presumably due to the weather. The kiosks don’t work very well in the winter, which is much of the Wisconsin year. I pushed in my parking spot number, and the kiosk told me it was wrong. I pushed it in again, and the kiosk told me again it was wrong. I slogged back to my car to double-check my number. It was exactly the one I had struggled to punch in.

I went back to the kiosk and entered the number again. The kiosk told me it was wrong.

The damned thing wasn’t working.

But DPW is happy — the kiosks that don’t work in the cold, can’t be read in the sun and are difficult for some to get to in the snow are inconvenient and nonfunctional only for the customers who use them, not for the agency that earns revenue from them.

And we know who counts.

But I can’t help wondering if installing kiosks that are basically inaccessible to so many people for so much of the year doesn’t violate some law or another.

With all that is going on, don’t lose track…

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The masonry falling from the newly-restored City Hall is a really big deal. The JS had the story.

Streets and sidewalks near Milwaukee City Hall were cordoned off Friday after a piece of masonry fell from the recently renovated structure and damaged a parked car.

No one was hurt when a chunk of terra cotta fell off the east side of the building about 6:45 p.m. Thursday and broke into three pieces of about 5 pounds each, said Larry Rocole, vice president of the Milwaukee office of J.P. Cullen & Sons, the contractor that led the three-year, $66 million renovation of the 115-year-old building.

With all that is going on in Madison and around the state, it might be tempting to just let this one slide by. But with the death from falling concrete at O’Donnell Park and the $76 million price tag for the City Hall restoration (not including millions more for the continuing foundation and sidewalk work), this story is definitely worth a close follow.

Milwaukee Water Works’ bad idea approved for suburbs, too

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The Milwaukee Water Works’ really bad proposal to gives incentive to companies  to waste water was approved by the Public Service Commission last week and, over the objections of the city, extended to suburban communities that buy water from the utility.

Yup, the city comes out with absolutely no net advantage with its new, screw-you-residential-ratepayer plan and avoids for at least another year dealing with the hard issue of excess capacity in its water system. Big water using ratepayers get an economic development rate discount; others get the bill for the city’s failure to deal with the issue.

A really, really bad aspect of this new discount is that the companies that get it don’t even have to show that new jobs they add have anything to do with the additional water that is going down the drain or with the rate break they are getting.

So much for Milwaukee city government trying to sell itself as “green.” Mayor Tom Barrett and the Common Council should be embarrassed about this one. Residential ratepayers and anyone who cares about the health of area waterways should be furious.

To qualify for the bad new discount, a new business must use 500,000 gallons of water per billing period, and an existing business must increase its water use per billing period from a baseline of at least 1 million gallons  to 2.5 million gallons, or by 50%, whichever is less.

A business seeking the discount must submit a water use and efficiency plan to the Water Works, and file an affidavit swearing that it would not increase water consumption without the encouragement of the economic development rate. (Emphasis added.) Enforcement of the plan? Water Works would be allowed to audit each recipient’s water use, but there is no mention of who would do the auditing. New staff? Doesn’t that cost money, requiring more revenue, requiring higher water rates? And if a company is caught cheating, it will have 90 days to stop. (“Really, officer? I was going a hundred miles over the limit? I promise I will slow down in three months.”)

The firm must create 25 jobs within 90 days of approval of the discount. There is no requirement that adding the jobs have anything to do with the additional water use or the water rate discount. There just needs to be 25 new jobs.

Let’s think about this one a little bit. Let’s say you are a big water-using-business planning to expand and add jobs. Wouldn’t you apply for the discount and wait until you know if you have gotten it before adding those jobs? It’s not a hard decision to make, since if you add them too soon, you won’t qualify for the discount! By waiting and adding the jobs later, you can get the discount that has nothing to do with the jobs you were going to add anyway. What a deal for the business! There is a downside, though, for the city: job creation may actually be put on hold until while the company waits for its free money to be confirmed.

And let’s say you are a new business that adds 600 jobs but only uses 400,000 gallons of water per billing period. What you get is — jack sh–! Too bad, buddy!

There are a few environmental requirements that must be met to qualify for the discount, but they are almost laughable. The Water Works must certify to the PSC that the additional consumption won’t hurt the water supply and that it will not increase water rates for other customers. If the latter is true — if the Water Works can lose revenue from one source without replacing it from another source — then it already is operating with a bloated budget and is overcharging customers and the PSC should re-examine the huge rate increases it just granted to the utility.

If  the Water Works must charge other customers more to recover what it loses by granting the discount, then it will either have to deny all discount applications or pass those costs on to other customers in the form of increased rates.

And how is the Water Works supposed to know the impacts of each business on the overall quality and health of the water system? Are cumulative impacts considered? It does not appear that they will be. So if each of 100 businesses receiving the discount has a negligible effect on Lake Michigan, but collectively they will destroy it, the collectively part of the equation will not be considered.

The Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District, meanwhile, must certify that it can treat the increased wastewater without adversely affecting the operation of its plants or increasing charges to other customers. Given the flooding and overflows in recent years, how on earth could it possibly do that?

This is a crazy, bad plan. The Milwaukee Water Works how has the authority to implement the crazy, bad plan, but it is not required to do so. And it should not.

The PSC’s Milwaukee water rate decisions

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The Milwaukee Water Works went before the Public Service Commission with a pretty weak case for a major rate hike.  The good news is that PSC members made it pretty clear that they won’t support the money grab the Water Works is trying to make. The bad news is that two of three members of the PSC signalled support of a program to support water consumption by industry, likely subsidized by residential ratepayers.

First, the rate case. As the JS reported this week, the Water Works was looking for an average increase of 27% in Milwaukee, with widely varying increases in the suburbs. Think about it: 27%. The Water Works has a lot of excess capacity that isn’t generating revenue, but that still must be maintained, and that costs money. But the folks at the city who thought raising prices astronomically would help didn’t really think it through. Raising rates so gosh-darned much would only discourage water use — fewer people would use hoses to water their gardens, or would wash cars in their driveways, etc. etc. The city could do itself more harm than good by making people resist higher water bills by cutting water usage. (Ironically, the city might unintentionally do the environment a nice favor by discouraging water use, but that is not the Water Works intent.)

The city also hurt the Water Works’ cryin’ the blues case when it snagged $3 million in surplus Water Works revenue to fill a hole in this year’s city budget, a fact that suburban opponents of the water rate increase hammered home to the PSC. They also said that Milwaukee Water Works uses a lot more cash financing for capital projects than do other water utilities. There are arguments for and against cash financing, but there is no doubt the Water Works could lower its immediate cash needs by borrowing more for capital projects.

Finally, and it’s not a small point, the city’s own Legislative Reference Bureau reported that Water Works will cut expenses by 4% “without compromising service.”

All those things argue against the rate increase requested by the city. Does the Water Works need more money? Most likely. But 27%? C’mon. Let’s talk about the ability to pay of city residents, especially those in the central city with the lowest incomes and the leakiest — and thus more expensive — water service.

Unfortunately, two of the three commissioners seem ready to pile on residential ratepayers by approving an “economic development rate,” which basically gives a price break to industries that dramatically increase their water usage.Yes, a reward for behaving in a potentially environmentally irresponsible way.

This handy dandy favor for the big guys will quite possibly  shift additional costs on to residential and small business ratepayers. The idea behind the economic development rate is that the additional water use will absorb some of the Water Works excess capacity while also creating jobs, but if there has been a solid proposal for measuring  the impact of corporate water subsidies on job creation, I haven’t seen it. (If there is one out there, someone please point it out to me.) Is everyone just going to assume that any job added at any firm getting a water rate break was added because of the water rate break? That would be pretty silly.  It would make a lot more sense for the city to do a performance audit of its existing water marketing strategies and fixing those before asking residential ratepayers to chip in to supply industries with water.