Repairing Milwaukee’s old infrastructure means more jobs

By Richard W. Wanta

One frequently reads that Milwaukee’s inner-city jobless rate is nearly 60 percent.

Last April, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett asked area firms to help turn that around so residents could have family supporting jobs. The availability of manufacturing jobs in the area is dwindling, but construction workers in Wisconsin receive family supporting wages, health benefits and even a pension.

The problem is that many of our laborers and operating engineers are more than 40 years old. We need young people to train as replacements for our older work force, but we need a long-term, sustained jobs program to train them on.

For Milwaukee’s inner city, that would be employment to do partial combined-sewer separation, repair of the roads and curb and gutter replacement over the course of 20 years.

Think about it. The construction industry would provide hands-on training for the area’s unemployed on partial combined-sewer separation and road repair. Those old combined sewers are located in the inner city, where many of the unemployed live, so the new hires wouldn’t even need a car to get to work.

The road, curb and gutter and landscape contractors follow up behind us as we replace that old sewer, and they could provide additional training to the new hires. We can also use some of the unemployed to haul aggregate and pipe to the job site.

We wouldn’t displace any existing workers. We would just add one unemployed resident to each crew for on-the-job training. The wages for that extra worker could be paid by the city as a line item in its specifications, so all contractors could competitively bid the work.

Whatever our industry does to partially separate combined sewers in the inner city will reduce the amount of rainwater entering the city’s deep tunnel. By freeing up additional capacity in the existing deep tunnel by sending less rainwater for treatment to Jones Island, we could reduce sewer discharges into area waterways while providing a true employment opportunity.

In addition to the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District sewer overflows, one only has to drive through the inner city to see the need for repairs on Milwaukee’s poor roads. Again the idea is a sustained program of partial combined-sewer separation and road repairs over 20 years to occur where and when it makes economic and environmental sense to do so.

But we cannot be expected to train a large number of Milwaukee’s inner-city residents on the small budget that the city puts out for sewer replacement and street repair. To do a good job of training large numbers of unemployed, we need much more infrastructure funding for long-term training opportunities. You cannot train a tradesperson out of a textbook; they must actually do the work.

We are not the first group to advocate a jobs program for a city’s unemployed. Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin saw sewer replacement as a way to put people to work in her community.

Franklin dubbed herself the “sewer mayor” to promote jobs and reduce state sanctions for dumping sewage in area waterways in her community. Atlanta committed itself to complete sanitary-sewer separation over 20 years and started a program to separate 27 percent of its 330 miles of combined sewers. In St. Paul, Minn., officials completed a sewer separation program in 10 years.

The underground and paving contractors can reduce Milwaukee’s unemployment rate, train people and give them real skills and provide family supporting wages if the city and the MMSD truly work in partnership with construction employers. Or we can do nothing, continue to read about 60 percent unemployment, continue to witness combined-sewer overflows and dodge huge inner-city potholes for years to come.