New trails in Milwaukee County help curtail illegal park dumping

Key Takeaways

Milwaukee County, Wis. puts a lot of time, energy and money into its 150 parks, but a good amount of that money was go­ing into things visitors would never see. Or at least park offi­cials hoped they wouldn’t see it. 

Along with giving residents all over the county a place to get away and enjoy nature, the parks’ 15,000 acres were also hiding numerous illegal dump­ing sites. And thousands of dol­lars were going into cleaning them up, including $19,000 for a single dumping site. 

Those cleanups add up to 600 hours of staff time per year, with 60 dumps cleaned from 2021-2023, the average clean­up cost adding up to $14,000. 

“We see a lot of dumping around the first of the month near the north end of the coun­ty, and that’s often tied to evic­tions,” said Peter Bratt, direc­tor of Operations and Skilled Trades for Milwaukee County Parks. “We get a lot of dumping like that, or contractors who dump building materials be­cause they don’t want to pay tipping fees at a transfer sta­tion, or medical waste. That’s when we have to call in con­tractors to clean it up.” 

Often the dumping was a crime of convenience, the forgotten sharp side of a dou­ble-edged sword promoted by 1920s planner Charles Whit­nall, whose parkway system was designed to bring people into the parks. But those same roads that brought Sunday drivers up to Washington Park can carry a truck with a lot of junk to drop off in one of the northern county’s most fre­quent dumping grounds. 

But the county is doing something about it. First, the Board of Supervisors has au­thorized fines of up to $5,000 for illegal dumping, up from $200. 

A structural fix, though, will make it harder for some of those trucks to reach secluded dump sites. The 2025 budget includes funding to turn some roads into multi-use paths, re­inforcing their purpose to help visitors enjoy the park while limiting automobile traffic. 

That will take about .9 miles of Little Menomonee River Parkway and shrink it in half. In 2023, the county had already blocked that second and saw immediate improvements in cleanliness. Now, it will be con­verted, thanks to ARPA fund­ing, and reopened for cyclists and pedestrians. 

“It’s a trail on either end of the parkway, so it logically makes sense to turn it into one big trail,” Bratt said. “They’re not really that long but the real key segments and they really help the users and just really makes our system more acces­sible.”