South Milwaukee Blog

The South Milwaukee Police Department has a couple events planned for the summer.

• The 10th annual DARE Golf Outing is at 8 a.m. on Monday, July 19 at Oakwood Golf Course. The four-person scramble event costs $65 person. Contact Officer McLean or Officer Kozlowski for more information and to sign up.
• The ninth annual South Milwaukee Community Night Out event is from 5 to 9 p.m. on Thursday, August 12, at City Hall. This first-class event includes booths, games, food, entertainment and fireworks.

Learn more on the Community page on the SMPD website.

The South Milwaukee Water Utility has prepared a letter to residents who have questions and concerns about the 52 percent rate increase it is seeking with the Wisconsin Public Service Commission.

Click here to see the document. From it:

If the PSC grants this increase, customers may see an increase of approximately $8.00 to $10.00 per month on their water bills. How the PSC arrives at applying the increase is to be determined, and the increase to individual customers will vary with water usage. …

It’s important to provide residents some background on how we got to this point. There are a number of reasons behind the rate increase, including:

• Mandated plant improvements;
• Declines in industrial water use; and
• Improved conservation efforts (low flow appliances, toilets, washing machines, shower heads) resulting in declining residential water use.

The plant upgrades were a significant contributor – but also a necessary one …

The down economy has only served to drive that increase higher. South Milwaukee began to feel the effects of the struggling economy just when the upgraded facilities were placed into operation, and we began to realize that many of our heavy water users (industry and manufacturing), as well as many smaller users, had cut back on water consumption. Today, water consumption is running approximately 20% less than projections. This, in turn, impacts Water Utility revenues.

The Water Utility is also encouraging residents who have questions, comments or concerns about the rate increase to call them at 768-8070.

As I wrote about last week, a large water rate increase is in the offing. Now we know the proposed size of that increase: 52%.

Learn more in this Journal Sentinel story.

I’ll have more to post on this in coming days. And feel free to post your comments below.

You can see my previous posts on this here and here.

City Engineer Kyle Vandercar had an excellent presentation about the planned Nicholson Avenue reconstruction project on Tuesday — a preview of the public information meeting planned for May 26.

• You can see a copy of the fact sheet shared at the meeting here.
• Click here to see the letter sent to area residents promoting the public information meeting.
• And here is a PDF of the official public information meeting notice.

I hope to see you at the meeting, planned for 5 to 7 p.m. next Wednesday at City Hall.

The meeting on Tuesday night provided me my first real glimpse at the options, and I like what I saw.

I go into this thinking some type of widening is necessary to address what I believe is an unsafe road that can no longer handle the amount of traffic that uses it every day. The two options on the table are both four lanes — one with a median, one without. There are pros and cons of both, and I’d like to hear what you think at the public information meeting … and learn more about the project myself.

South Milwaukee is joining other area communities to put our best foot forward with real estate professionals at the industry’s largest leasing event starting this Sunday in Las Vegas.

City Development Director Danielle Devlin is attending the International Council of Shopping Centers convention to promote our city-owned development parcels and other redevelopment opportunities in South Milwaukee.

It’s part of a larger effort to promote the area around Mitchell International Airport via the Airport Gateway Business Association.

Learn more in this Journal Sentinel story. From the story:

Representatives from Milwaukee and some of the suburbs that are members of the Airport Gateway Business Association are cooperating to staff a booth at the convention to promote the area within a 15-minute drive of the airport as a place to do business.

Efforts to promote urban airport complexes – dubbed aerotropolises – have been around for years at a number of cities across the U.S. The local effort focuses on cooperation among eight municipalities near the airport: Milwaukee, St. Francis, Cudahy, Oak Creek, South Milwaukee, Franklin, Greenfield and Greendale. Most of them will have at least one person at the International Council of Shopping Centers convention, said Tom Rave, executive vice president of the Airport Gateway group.

But they will not be promoting any particular retail venue, Rave said. With 15-minutes-from-the-airport as the defining criteria, the effort would include Milwaukee’s Third Ward as well as the downtown, where retail vacancies abound, particularly in the Shops of Grand Avenue. In Greendale, Southridge has lots of space looking for tenants at the south end of the mall.

I’m glad South Milwaukee is a part of this effort. I’ve said since my campaign that we need to do a better job of selling ourselves as a city, and this is a great way to do it. We have a great story to tell, and we’ll be telling it in the City of Lights.

Good selling, Danielle!

Pavement reconstruction work is scheduled to begin this week on 15th Avenue.

Work is being done in two phases, with phase one from College Avenue to Oak Creek Parkway. The second phase goes from Oak Creek Parkway south Rawson.

Learn more in this letter sent to area residents. From the note:

Emergency vehicles will have access to the area at all times. Local emergency services have been notified of the construction schedule and will route emergency vehicles accordingly. There will be no on-street parking in areas of active construction. The Milwaukee County Transit System has been notified and will be rerouting bus lines to accommodate construction. Please be advised that some driveways, sidewalks and crosswalks will be temporarily closed during construction.

I’ll keep you posted on this project as the summer progresses.

South Milwaukee has a new alderman.

The City Council on Monday night chose former Cudahy City Clerk-Treasurer Joe Bukowski as the new 3rd District alderman. He replaces Jim Shelenske, who was elected city clerk in April and resigned his seat on the council.

Six 3rd District residents applied for the job: Jon Spansail, Rich Raduenz, Tom Arend, Patrick Hintz, Rodney (Buck) Hillestad and Bukowski, who won the initial round of voting 5-1-1. Raduenz and Hillestad also received votes.

Bukowski, who has lived in the 3rd District for eight years, is no stranger to politics, and he easily had the most experience of the six candidates.

He was Cudahy clerk/controller/treasurer from 1990 to 1997, winning elections in 1992, 1994 and 1996 and serving as chairman of that city’s Community Development Authority and Fourth of July Committee. Bukowski was also involved in developing Cudahy’s tax incremental financing districts and economic development plan and managed major projects like the remodeling of City Hall.

Bukowski, who has a bachelor’s degree in finance from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and MBA from Cardinal Stritch University, currently serves as vice president and branch manager for the Northwestern Mutual Credit Union in Franklin.

His community service experience is also extensive. Bukowski is active in Boy Scouts at Divine Mercy — where he is also on the FunFest Committee — and is the volunteer advisor and auditor to Cudahy’s Project Concern and Cudahy/St. Francis Interfaith. He also served for years on the Cudahy Historical Society and Cudahy Lions Club.

That experience was certainly a factor in him winning my vote. But I also liked what he had to say in response to a number of our interview questions. He was honest, forthright, and showed a sound vision for the city — one that he said includes the downtown opportunity brought by the Kenosha-Racine-Milwaukee commuter rail line and its planned South Milwaukee stop.

Service, he said, is a part of his life, and serving on the City Council will be an extension of that.

Bukowski will officially be sworn in at Tuesday night’s City Council meeting. He will serve out the remainder of Shelenske’s term and face his first election next April. Please join me in welcoming him on board.

Carrying what had to be 50 pounds of gear, gulping air through an oxygen mask and dragging a hose down a pitch-black, smoke-filled stairway on the way to put out an actual fire in the next room, I quickly realized something.

I am not cut out to be a firefighter. And those that are — those that do this for a living — are true heroes.

I, and fellow 4th District of South Milwaukee Alderman David Bartoshevich, had a chance to experience this at FIRE OPS 101, a crash course for elected officials and members of the media hosted by the Professional Firefighters of Wisconsin at the Madison Fire Department’s Fire and Safety Education Center on the Madison Area Technical College Truax campus.

It was a day I’ll never forget.

It started with a chance to practice our extrication skills — my chance to use the “jaws of life”  and a hydraulic “spreader” tool to literally take apart a junker car. Later, I got to practice ventilating a burning house by chopping and chainsawing a few holes in a roof. I gave CPR a try and watched some of my teammates perform a search and rescue operation. (Full disclosure: I begged off that assignment because of this nagging fear I have about crawling on my hands and knees in dark, confined spaces, wearing only an oxygen mask to breathe.)

That brings me to the burning home. It’s almost impossible for me to describe the feeling I had walking through that door and being greeted by the thick smoke and blackness … breathing thanks to a cannister of oxygen on your back … knowing that there were stairs in front of you that you couldn’t see …. four other people behind you feeding you hose … and a fire in an adjacent room that was waiting for you if you could feel your way through the dark.

After a stumble on the stairs … and losing my helmet due to the fall … I avoided the couch in the middle of the first room and slowly crawled into the second room … where the fire was burning. And there I waited, on my hands and knees, for the other team members to catch up to me. I then sprayed some water from the hose (to see what it felt like) and happily got the heck out of there.

Never before had I been so happy to see daylight. I about ripped off my oxygen mask and thanked God I would not have to do that again.

It was frightening and fascinating at the same time. It was also enlightening, much like the entire day was.

Making the day even richer was South Milwaukee firefighter Brian Bieganski, a member of the International Association of Fire Fighters Local 1633. He was terrific as our team leader, making sure we got the most out of the experience by answering any and all questions about the successes, and challenges, of the South Milwaukee Fire Department. His depth of knowledge was impressive. From the intricacies of structural design to sharing some of his real-world firefighting stories, Brian provided invaluable perspective.

IAFF Local 1633 firefighter Mike Landgraf was also an instructor at the event, joining dozens of firefighters from around the state in ensuring that newbies like me didn’t kill ourselves.

So, what did I learn from all of this? Of course, I learned how hard it is to be a firefighter — just how physically and mentally demanding that job can be.

More importantly, however, I learned just how complex the scene of a fire, car accident or other emergency can be, just how many simultaneous moving parts there are once a firefighting crew arrives. Hose crews. Ventilation. Search and rescue. Medical services. Everybody on that scene has a job, and each one is vitally important to ensuring that lives are saved.

It is a lesson I will take with me every time the City Council ponders the South Milwaukee Fire Department budget and its staffing needs … a lesson forever seared in my mind by those five minutes inside that burning building.

(Check out some other media coverage from the Capital Times and NBC 15 in Madison.)

In case you missed it, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s lead story on Wednesday was all about looming major water rate increases in Milwaukee and other communities.

South Milwaukee is not included in the article, but one is coming for us, too, as I wrote about in this post.

From the article:

Proposed water rate increases would threaten jobs, make the area less competitive, unfairly penalize suburbs and hurt consumers during a recession, according to corporate officials and customers objecting to proposals shared with Milwaukee aldermen Wednesday. Most customers – residential and business – face price increases of around 30%, but some suburbs are looking at more than 50%, in the rate schedule proposed by the Wisconsin Public Service Commission. …

Jacking up the cost of doing business is a terrible strategy at a time of economic struggle, said Steve Baas, government affairs director for the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce.

“Our low water rates are one of the competitive advantages this region has, and a dramatic increase like this reduces our edge and sends a bad signal as we try to attract new companies,” he said Wednesday. “If you raise rates, you run the risk of further depressing economic activity, or giving incentive to more conservation, which further shrinks the pie and creates a need for even further rate increases. The only real solution is growth, expand the consumption base, have more people paying into the system.”

I can’t disagree. And you can see why this is such a complex issue, one with no easy solutions.

I’ll keep you posted on South Milwaukee’s upcoming rate increase.

Put Wednesday, May 26, on your calendar. That’s the date of the public information meeting on the planned expansion of Nicholson/Pennsylvania Avenue between College and Rawson Avenues.

It runs from 5 to 7 p.m. at City Hall, 2424 15th Avenue.

Learn more in the official notice here. From the notice:

The proposed project includes capacity expansion by reconstructing the existing 2-lane roadway to a 4-lane facility, with construction planned for 2012.  Federal and State funding provides approximately 80% of the estimated $4.5 million design and construction costs, with Oak Creek and South Milwaukee each funding 10%.

The informational meeting will be “open house” format, and is being held to provide preliminary design information, to discuss proposed improvements and alternatives, and to gather your comments and concerns on the proposed project.  The open house format meeting is flexible, so feel free to come and go as you desire.

I will have more information to post on this project — including more on the alternatives that you will see at the public information meeting — in the coming days. Stay tuned.

I look forward to seeing you at the meeting, but I’d also appreciate your feedback here. Post a comment below!

A tragic story out of Cudahy …

A man was struck and killed by a train, apparently by accident, on Ramsey Avenue just west of Packard.

Learn more in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story here.

Well, you can’t call South Milwaukee’s 3rd District politically inactive.

Six candidates — including former Alderman Richard Raduenz, former school board member Tom Arend and former Cudahy City Clerk Joseph Bukowski — want to replace Jim Shelenske as the district’s next alderman.

The number of interested candidates is a bit surprising to me given that this is the same district that fielded no competition for Jim or Lisa Pieper in the 2009 general election.

In fact, three of the city’s four districts had no competition for the incumbents last year. I was part of the only contested race.

You can see the full Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story here.

The City Council will interview the six candidates, all men, at a special meeting starting at 5:30 p.m. Monday. The chosen candidate will then serve out the remainder of Jim’s term, meaning he will be up for re-election next April.

South Milwaukee Police Chief Ann Wellens recognized a number of her officers and local residents for acts of heroism and selflessness at our most recent City Council meeting.

Click here and take a few minutes to read all of their stories.

My favorite? The three officers who rescued a woman from the icy waters of Lake Michigan one February night. Here is an excerpt from the PDF linked above: “Officers Marin and Rotter leaned over the edge of the bank while Officer Dews held them by the feet while Officers Marin and Rotter pulled the woman to safety.”

Amazing stuff … and just another example of the heroic work and dedication of our police and fire departments. Thanks for all you do and how you do it.

Joshua Wollinger, the South Milwaukee man charged with homicide in the stabbing death of Richard E. Ostrowski in April, was bound over for trial at his preliminary Milwaukee County Circuit Court hearing last Monday.

“Probable cause” was found in the case after testimony from several South Milwaukee Police Department officers and others.

You can see a description of the proceedings on the state’s CCAP system here.

Wollinger’s arraignment is set for May 19, where he’ll likely enter a plea. I’ll keep you posted.

For all my 3rd District readers out there, you have until Wednesday to apply to replace Jim Shelenske as 3rd District alderman in South Milwaukee.

You’ll recall that Shelenske had to give up his seat after he was elected City Clerk in April. The City Council will conduct interviews of all candidates at a special meeting on Monday, May 17.

Learn more in my previous post on this topic.