Pitting the city of Milwaukee against the state of Wisconsin is nothing new in Badger State politics. But that type of toxic rhetoric reached a new low this spring when Republican legislative leadership indicated they would not support a proposal from the new Democratic governor to replace lead pipes across the state because too much of the money would be going to Milwaukee. With these comments, this much has been made clear: Wisconsin Republicans are playing politics with something that quite literally is poisoning children in the state’s largest city.
The infrastructure bringing water into people’s homes is a public safety threat, one that puts children and pregnant mothers at particular risk. Gov. Tony Evers is proposing to add a $40 million budget item to begin the process of replacing the 200,000 lead lateral service lines in Wisconsin, 77,000 of which are in Milwaukee.
Rep. John Nygren (R-Marinette), a powerful member of the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee, speaking alongside Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Burlington), said on Wednesday, April 10, “My understanding is that the proposal, a vast majority of it, is going to Milwaukee. We had targeted our response to the lead issue as a local opportunity for communities to get involved and provide assistance at the local level, rather than people from Marinette funding lead replacements in Milwaukee. I’m not sure that that’s necessarily fair from a taxpayer standpoint.”
Data actually show the opposite. Milwaukee is subsidizing Marinette. Tax revenues coming from both the city and county of Milwaukee going to the state are greater than the amount of money coming back to Milwaukee from the state. The revenues coming from Milwaukee have increased in recent years, while the amount of state shared revenue returning to Milwaukee has remained flat, and for the past several years Milwaukee has been a net revenue producer for Wisconsin, with the city of Milwaukee essentially subsidizing the rest of the state.
The GOP Has No Plan
Republican legislative leadership is also ignoring Milwaukee completely within the discussion it is having on water quality in Wisconsin. Vos recently convened the “Speaker’s Task Force on Water Quality,” which consists of 16 state legislators from both parties with not a single representative from Milwaukee. The Task Force is holding informational hearings around the state—none of which have occurred or are planned in Milwaukee.
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“Even though many of the individuals who sit on that committee may well want to do the right thing and believe they should be coming to Milwaukee, at the end of the day, we know Robin Vos is pulling the strings on this. He has been pulling the strings on everything since he’s been Speaker,” said State Rep. David Crowley (D-Milwaukee).
Crowley chairs the Milwaukee Democratic Legislative Caucus, and the day following Nygren’s and Vos’ comments, that group of 15 members of the state Assembly and state Senate sent a letter to members of the Task Force calling the lack of Milwaukee representation and failure to show up here “completely unacceptable.” The letter points out that in 2016, 10.8% of Milwaukee children had elevated levels of lead in their blood; Flint, Michigan’s average is 4.9%. “Lead piping is one of the biggest contributors to elevated lead levels, and more than 70,000 homes, businesses and daycare centers get their water through lead piping in Wisconsin’s most populous city,” the letter continues. The problem “disproportionately affects low-income families and children of color, who are largely unable to move to a home with safe water on a whim. This is not the ‘Year of Clean Ground and Well Water.’ This is the Year of Clean Water. That means clean water for everyone in Wisconsin, regardless of how it’s delivered.”
Evers declared 2019 as the Year of Clean Drinking Water during his State of the State speech in January. The governor’s plans call for $83 million to address a host of water quality issues all over the state, $40 million of which goes toward bonding authority to pay for lead pipe replacement. The proposal could pay for up to 50% of the cost of replacing a lead pipe in Milwaukee.
Democrats Facing the Issue
Preston Cole, current secretary of the Department of Natural Resources (DNR), is taking the issue seriously. “The sheer volume of lead laterals in Milwaukee makes it a crisis,” he says. “It may be overwhelming to some, but it’s too important not to begin. We have to start, and what the funding strategy does is a continuation of lead lateral replacement, and this governor is doubling down on drinking water, as you’ve seen.”
When you call something a crisis, you have to treat it as such. And this crisis goes beyond the $40 million proposed. “The price tag is spectacular,” says David Strifling, director of the Water Law and Policy Initiative at Marquette University Law School. “We’re looking at a problem that’s going to stretch out over decades, not years. Even if the governor’s plan—the money he’s allocated for in the budget—goes through, all of it, we’re still talking about something on the order of 9 or 10% of the problem.”
The estimate for the cost of replacing all lead pipes in Milwaukee is $750 million, and it’s not just Milwaukee that has these problems. According to Cole, “130 cities, towns and villages have reported to the DNR they have some number of lead laterals.” “Any older community is going to have this issue,” says Strifling. “Beloit, Waukesha, Racine, Green Bay. If you go outside the state, Chicago has a ton of them. It’s not a Milwaukee problem. It’s an older city problem. It dates back to an era when lead was a preferred building material.”
Local municipalities do have a newer tool at their disposal to help fund the replacement of the lead pipe in the form of the Leading On Lead Act, passed by the Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Scott Walker in 2018. This changes state law so that water utilities can use ratepayer dollars to fund these types of replacements. It comes with several requirements and is somewhat limited in scope, says Strifling, but does provide a tool for municipalities to do something, albeit through raising rates and putting a greater burden on those with more limited means. “When you see some of the Republican legislators talk about, ‘Well, we want Marinette to pay for Marinette and Milwaukee to pay for Milwaukee,’ this is what they’re talking about,” says Strifling. That act, however, appears to be the end of what Republican legislators are willing to support to help children and families in Milwaukee from being poisoned by their drinking water.
Is Cruelty the Point?
Make no mistake, city government in Milwaukee has a role in this larger conversation, too, and there is an audit and an ongoing local and state criminal investigation into the City Health Department and its failings to address lead poisoning among Milwaukee children. But that certainly doesn’t make the issue any less urgent. It certainly doesn’t make the Republican legislative leadership’s action to drop the proposal from the state budget somehow more noble.
One of the most important pieces written during the Donald Trump era is “The Cruelty Is the Point,” by Adam Serwer in The Atlantic. The essay brilliantly details how the shared celebration of cruelty toward a variety of disadvantaged and maligned groups is a central element driving both the culture that swirls around Trumpism as well as his administration’s policies. With Trump as the standard-bearer for the GOP, is this not a state-level example of how “cruelty is the point?” How can you define ignoring poisoned children as anything other than being cruel? How are you supposed to feel as a family from Milwaukee reading these remarks from Nygren and Vos?
“We [as legislators] have to push for and act on the values of the state as a whole, and to hear two of the biggest Republican leaders in the state Assembly say that this is going to send too much money to Milwaukee is a slap in the face,” says Crowley. “If we’re going to push this state forward, we need to do it as a whole and not just focus on particular districts. We have to do everything we can to make sure we have healthy families and healthy children moving forward in this state.”
This is a big deal. Nygren and Vos should apologize for what they said and do so in Milwaukee during a public hearing with the Speaker’s Task Force. Following that, it would be best if they return to their posts and find a solution—one that doesn’t treat the citizens of the state’s largest city as a political football but addresses the crisis at hand with the seriousness it demands. Wisconsin can’t let Milwaukee become another Flint.
Vos, Nygren and ranking Joint Finance Committee member state Sen. Alberta Darling did not respond to questions for this article.
