Public Works Committee - Regular Meeting

Good morning. I like to call this public works meeting, to order. I am order woman chairwoman Melele a Cox. We are joined to my right by vice chairman argument Lamont Westmoreland. To his right, by alderwoman Larissa Taylor.

We are also joined to my left by staff assistant Joanna Ortiz, and to her left by alderman Alex Brower. We are joined to his left by Alderman Robert Baumann. We also have president Jose Perez present with us as well as the Morrissey Police Department. Item number one, file number 250668, a substitute ordinance relating to the exemptions from city charges and fees for projects related to accessible entrances. This is sponsored by alderwoman Demetrijevich. I believe she is joining us on the board.

Yes. I'm here, madam. Carolman, can you

hear me?

Yes.

Okay. May I begin?

Yes. Go ahead.

Thank you so much, Carolman Cogs. Also, thanks for accommodating my request. I'm on my way, to the final leg of the safe talk in honor of the late, Alderman Brosstaff, I and wanna thank you all for your support of funding that. So what we have in front of us today, you received an email, I think, yesterday from our city clerk, and perhaps you may have seen some of the news. We also linked an article, madam chair and colleagues, about the wonderful place and space for all people at all times, which is called Cactus Club in my district.

And we've known them for their advocacy and work that they've done with Beat Street. So the owner is working very hard to be one of the first accessible, all ages concert venues, really somewhat in the nation. And what was so important to Kelsey was that when we accommodate buildings for all abilities, many times the construction of the ramp is very expensive. And generally, if you all can think about it, they go on the side or the back. And to Kelsey, she wanted everybody to feel the same entrance at the same time that VIP experience.

So if you drive by on Russell Avenue, you'll see that the ramp is out front so everyone can come in together. What we encountered along the way was what is sometimes encountered by those with different abilities and needs, which

are barriers. And what you have in front of you and I wanna

Gunner. It hits multi departments, and it actually has to go to three committees. We'll be taking a full public testimony at finance, including from Kelsey, of what they experienced. And there was just many fees. And instead of being an incentive, madam chair, it actually became a barrier and a disincentive to do this kind of work to make a private building accessible.

So we've asked the office of the city attorney, public works, DNS, and everyone to review it. And we feel that we have a really good item in front of us that's taken a couple months, which is when you're modifying a building to make an accessible ramp and make that building accessible for everybody, that there would not be such huge amount of fees in order to do that. In fact, I'll conclude with we wanna make it as easy as possible for one to be able to get into as many buildings as possible in the city of Milwaukee. So I'd ask you to support this, and I thank you for your time.

Thank you. Are there any questions for the sponsor?

Yeah, madam chair.

Go

ahead. Yeah. Thanks. I just wanted to say, Alderman, thank you so much for taking the lead on this, and I I completely support this. We need to make sure that we can do what we can. We obviously have a bunch of housing stock and a bunch of buildings in this city that aren't accessible. And any step that we can take to work towards making them accessible is important. Thank you.

Alright. And we have DPW at the time.

Good morning, madam chair and alders. James Washington, public works coordination manager. DPW is in support of waiving fees that are strictly permit review fees. We had several fees that were for this Cactus Club development. One thing that we do are partially against is waiving fees for actual services that we provide. So if there's actual work that we have to do, if there's any sort of inspection that we have to do, that's actual physical labor that we're putting in, that's above and beyond the permit fees, that we will still want to assess. But as far as all the permit fees associated with these type of accessibility developments, we are in favor of waiting.

Madam chair, may I respond to that?

Yes. I don't want make your average.

Okay. And and mister Washington, thank you so much for your work and your specific work on this project because this project highlighted some improvements that we all needed to do. I received this feedback a few days ago when I spoke to the commissioner yesterday. It's my understanding that the way this is written, and I would ask us to double check with LRB or the city clerk, that those design fees that you're talking about are not eliminated here, because we do want to recognize that that is quite labor intense. So this is mostly taking the permitting the way that I understood it. Hopefully, we can get that on the record.

There is there Okay. Gunner.

Gunnar Raj from the LRB. So this ordinance waives fees only if a set of conditions are met. It waives two specific fees from chapter 81 and then it waives, I believe, all of the fees from, I believe, chapter 200. But again, that is only if a certain set of conditions are met. So for example, the usable square footage of the property can't be increased by the addition or alteration.

And those set of criteria that apply, they only apply or the the intent here is that those criteria would only be met if this is a project that is specifically and limited to the creation of an accessible entrance. If this is part of a larger project, the ordinance is written so that all of the fees that would apply to the rest of the project are not exempt. The only the exemption is limited to the specific creation of that entrance. I would be careful. I I don't want to say at this moment, comment too much on which fees specifically are exempted because it applies to a number of fees in in chapter 200.

And so I don't want to make a claim about what fee it does and doesn't exempt without having the ordinance in front of me and and looking specifically at which fees are in 200 and which fees are in chapter 81.

So, governor, is is alderman Demetrivich's belief that the particular services when services are actually rendered, What was discussed here? Is that did you write it in such a way that it does do exactly what she thinks it does?

Well, I I think there are certain services that would be performed in which case there would be an exemption, based on my understanding. So if we look at there's a memo attached to the file that shows what the Cactus Club was charged, for for instance. And, so the Cactus Club was charged for a sidewalk restoration fee, a right of way excavation for a plan review, the property records fee, that was the largest, that was a thousand dollar fee. A training and technology fee, that was the smallest, it was $22 and 40¢. A processing fee and then a permit for an addition.

And so all of those fees would be exempted under the new ordinance as it's currently written.

Is so this are any of those exemptions he just named a a issue for you?

Given the infrequency of it, d b w, we could allow it, but part of the restoration fee is made up of three parts. Part of that is $64 is an inspection fee. We will prefer not to waive it, but if it's necessary for the file, then it happens infrequently enough that we'd be happy to do so.

Other one? No. I Demetrius?

Yes. Yes, madam chair. I mean, I gave them a copy of this, you know, over a week ago. So and I was taking feedback. So I appreciate that. I mean, truth be told, I I wanna be very transparent. I hope a lot of people do use this because I hope a lot of buildings do become more accessible. But I I do understand, and I just think it's a delicate balance. So excuse me. If we need to look at it more in the next two committees that it's at, but it it seems like we're in a reasonable compromise, and I appreciate Department of Public Works saying that. I'd like to proceed as it is. We've done a lot of work. Gunner has done amazing work. And it's too bad that this situation with Cactus Club exposed, like I said, what was some more barriers here. I I don't think it should be cost prohibitive to do the right thing.

So I would like to continue the way that it is, and it sounds to me at least that Department of Public Works is willing to work with us here.

All right. Any questions from committee? Go ahead, Alderman.

Thank you. My question really is what happens in if someone wants to improve their accessibility to their building, but also add a window or do something else. Are all of the permit fees then waived the way this is written, or is it just whatever specific to that entrance? If there's a larger project, an extensive remodel, are all of the permit fees related waived? Are they prorated based on the scope of work? It's one thing if someone's only improving their accessibility, but what if they're doing something else at the same time?

To my understanding of the ordinance as it's currently written, if you have a larger project, so you you build a a ramp, but you also put in a window and the window by itself would require an inspection, then that is not the the fee for that inspection would not be exempt just because you also added a ramp. So if you're building the ramp by itself, everything should be exempt. But if you're adding something else onto that project, the fees should be the same as if you just did that window by itself.

Okay. Thank you.

Any other questions from committee? Alright. We got a motion. Alderman Brower would move approval and ref and referral to zoning neighborhood and development committee. Are there any objections to that motion?

Hearing none, so order thank you, alderman. Thank you. Next up, file number 2250756, resolution determining it necessary to make various accessible public improvements at various locations and appropriating funds for these purposes with the city engineering cost estimated to be $15,000 for a total estimated cost of these projects being $300,000.

Good morning. Holly Rutenberg with the Department of Public Works. This is to set up engineering for future assessable construction projects.

Any questions on committee? Hearing none, alder Alderman Baumann with move of approval. Hearing no objections, so ordered. Item number three, file number two five zero seven five six, resolution determining necessary to make various non accessible public improvements at various locations and appropriating funds for these purposes with the city engineering cost estimated to be $60,000 for total estimated cost of these projects being $434,000.

Good morning. Holly Rittenbeck with DPW again. I do have a proposed substitute on this file. We had two projects that we needed to add from two different groups in DBW.

We have one copy on

July? Yes.

So it should be in the file.

And this is to set up engineering for future non accessible projects.

Alderman Taylor would move to have a proposed substitute a in front of us. Are there any objections to that motion? Hearing none, so ordered. Any questions from committee on proposed substitute a? Hearing none, Alderman Westwoman will move approval substitute a.

Are are there any objections? Hearing none, so order. Item number four, file number 250757, resolution approving construction of nonaccessible public improvements at various locations and appropriating funds for these purposes with the city construction cost estimated to be $295,000 for a total estimated cost of these projects being $1,316,000. And we propose substitute for that one as well?

No. No proposed substitute on this one. Yeah. Alright. And this is setting up construction funding for various non accessible projects.

Any questions from committee? Hearing that, alderman Brown would move approval. Hearing objections, so order file number five, file number item number five, file number two five zero seven four nine resolution authorizing the city of Milwaukee Department of Public Works to install an official stop sign at the publicly traveled rail road grade crossing at East Jones Street near South Lincoln Memorial Drive for the plan. National Highway Freight Program, improvement of South Lincoln Memorial Drive from South Car Ferry Drive to Jones Island.

Good morning. David Tapia, major project manager. This file just basically allows us to combine current condition is there's a railroad buck sign with a yield as you approach an intersection and then our stop sign. This is just to allow us to put both the railroad buck sign and the stop sign together on one assembly.

Any questions from committee? Hearing none, honorable miss Taylor would move approval. Item number six, file number two five zero seven five nine, resolution directing the commissioner of public works to execute state municipal agreements for a state led highway project with the Wisconsin Department of Transportation for the construction of S T H 2401 South 27th Street on Boxford Avenue to Howard Avenue and to set up funds for construction and an estimated total cost of $1,799,850 within estimated city share of $38,000 and a grantor share of $1,761,850.

And so this file sets up for our cost sharing of our utility adjustments for this repaving project.

Any questions on committee? Hearing none. So order item number seven. File number 250773. Resolution relating to the creation of the Marquis area racing Kenosha passenger rail commission. This is sponsored by alderman Baldwin. Do you wanna speak to an alderman?

I guess nobody from the department is here. Basically, is a file to support the creation of a commission to plan for the eventual construction of the Milwaukee Kenosha commuter rail program which was proposed back in the early two thousands. Went substantially through the process, was actually secured funding for construction and development, and then was properly ended by the Walker administration and his lieutenants at the state level. So this is an effort to restore that to again restore that planning process, to get the planning process back on track and the city would be represented by two commissioners. Is that correct?

Three. Three commissioners appointed by the mayor. There is some federal money available for study. There is no federal money yet available for actual construction, but at least it's worth studying the subject in the event that at some point there's a change of heart at the federal level. We're at least ready to proceed to implement the project.

Did you wanna speak, mister Miski?

Sure. Thank you, chair. Committee members, Dave Miski with the Department of City Development. Alderman Baumann is entirely correct. What this would establish is a commission that could then apply for what's called a a quarter ID with the federal government, which then puts us potentially in line for some of the federal funding that is available that would establish this rail line between Kenosha through Racine and into Milwaukee. So there has been some planning. There's been a steering committee that's been working on it for a year or two and a technical group that Kevin Muse, the City Engineer, has been part of as well. So we're queued up. We've been working very closely with both the other two municipalities, and all the mayors are very excited about the opportunity to apply for this grant.

Any questions for committee? I remember when I used to be an assistant at the county, the KRM, like and that was, like, almost twenty years ago, and the KRM was a big deal then. It's so interesting seeing it come back. Are there any questions for committee? Alright. Hearing now, alderman Brown will move approval. Hearing objection, so order. Item number eight, file number 250760. A resolution approving and adopting the agency safety plan for the hop MKE streetcar dated March 2025 version 7.1 and August 2025 version eight.

Good morning. Brian Hiegel, chief safety officer for the Milwaukee streetcar.

This tell us about the safety plan.

Yes, ma'am. So there is a safety plan that oversees the entire rail transit agency. We you guys are the board of directors and you have to approve each version of the safety plan. And I have two in front of you because the state and federal regulations change quickly. So eight would be the most current one.

Any questions from committee? Hearing now, Otto Woman Taylor will move approval. Hearing objection, so order. Thank you. Item number nine, file number 250625, resolution granting approval of driveway approach with a width greater than 30 feet for the premises at 432 East Kilborn Avenue in the 4th Automatic District.

Good morning. James Washington, public works coordination manager. So this file is for an expansion of a driveway for MSOE. They're expanding their Science building. The driveway will be expanded up to 45 feet and will include bringing the sidewalks up to current ADA compliance.

Any questions for committee? Hearing that, alderman Baumann will move approval. Hearing no objection, so ordered. Item number 10, file number two five zero six three zero, resolution authorizing the commissioner of public works to execute agreements with the Wisconsin Department of Transportation for the exchange of jurisdiction of two signalized intersections adjacent to IH 4394 in the city of Milwaukee.

Good morning. I'm Kyle Pfeifer, DBW. This is regarding the transfer of the signals at Beecher And 4th And Beecher And 5th Street in coordination with the reconstruction project happening at this location.

Any questions from committee? Hearing none, Audubon Westmoreland would move approval. Hearing objection, so order. Item number 11, file number two five zero six six three, resolution relating to this play of veterans mental health and suicide awareness flag. This is sponsored by alderman Taylor. Alderman Taylor.

Yes. So I guess last year, we were trying to bring more awareness to the amount of suicides that are committed by veterans. And in light of doing that, there is something called the twenty two push up challenge that we do, but we wanted to bring a little more awareness to it on the city level. And so I've worked with community activist Tracy Dent to create a flag that could then be displayed at city hall and at some of the city buildings. And then so we created this flag, and it's it got it was well received by many other veterans' offices.

And so we'd like to have a resolution for it to make it official.

Any questions from committee? Hearing now, Audubon Taylor will move approval and objections to order. Item number 12, file number two five zero seven nine zero, substitute resolution renaming Marketplace Triangle as George Gary Park. This is sponsored by Alderman Taylor and Alderman Stamper.

Okay. For this, George Gary was the president of Columbia Savings and Loan Bank, which is located on 20th And Fond Du Lac. And so being there for fifty years, he held tight to the mission of the Halyards who created the bank, which was done in an effort to give the black and brown community an avenue by which they could attain mortgages or business loans. And because he held close to that mission and was very successful in helping others to to gain some success in in that financial capacity. I think it's only fitting that we keep his keep what he has done, the mission at the forefront, and congratulate them and and appreciate them on the efforts that they have made in helping so many be successful in the black and brown community.

And in an effort to do that, we wanted to create a kind of a monument giving recognition to George Gehring and also to the Halyards. And so we chose there's a park that is owned by the city directly across the street from Columbia Savings and Loan. And so we've chosen to name that park to George Gary Park in order to keep his memory alive and the mission of the

Halyards. Any questions for committee?

I don't think so.

Yeah. I just wanna manager.

Go ahead.

Yeah. Just wanna say, Alderman Taylor, thank you so

much for honoring the legacy of this financial institution.

Thank you. Any other questions from committee? Hearing none. Audit woman Taylor with move approval. Are there any objections? Hearing none, so ordered. Item number thirteen two file number two five zero seven zero eight, an ordinance relating to the use and occupancy of city owned conduit system. And and there is a substitute.

Seven b.

Do we have to do a motion? Mhmm. Alderman Alderman Westmoreland would move to have substitute b before us. Hearing no objections, so ordered.

Good morning, chairman Cogs and members of the Public Works Committee. Jim Ole, city city of Milwaukee Innovation Office DOA. I'm joined by Anke Lee from the Department of Public Works here this morning. What you have before you is a essentially a full rewrite of chapter 98 of the city's code of ordinance. This is this governs the use and occupancy of the city's underground conduit systems.

For the somewhat newer members, the city has conduit duct that runs under the city streets for city purposes. We we run fiber from city building to city building. It allows us to connect and have telecoms because we do have excess space. We also lease out to other comms firms and rent space that as it is available. The last rewrite of this particular code was undertaken somewhere just after the the Federal Telecoms Act of 1996.

And so much of what here is arcane and there were a number of reasons that we decided to put pursue an entire rewrite. Essentially, reason for the changes falls under three buckets. Number one, we wanted to streamline the processes to improve our ability to generate fees and enhance our revenue collection. Number two was enhance our ability to regulate operations within our conduit system. And the third major reason was to tighten our efforts to assist at the collection, our collections of outstanding receivables and as member of this of this committee may know, the city has a outstanding receivables report that is presented to the finance committee here every year.

This is outstanding debts that are on the city. A number of these communication firms owe the city monies to the

tune

collectively of about $6,000,000 and this represents one of the largest areas of of desired collections here in the part of the

city

and we we hopefully have taken some measures in this particular rewrite to assist our efforts at collecting those outstanding receivables. On the whole, the major changes proposed really constitute several things. First and foremost, there's an updated there's updated occupancy rates to assist with achieving greater recovery, a 10% increase in all rates. Those rates, because we have not seen the rates increase in about two decades time, one of our efforts is to not have us fall behind. And so we have also index those new rates so that annually when the Bureau of Labor Statistics provides its annual index of inflationary adjustments upward, these rates will be changed on an annual basis.

In terms of registration requirements, new and existing occupants of the city's conduit system must register with the Department of Public Works and this initiates three year agreements upon the expiration of the old ones. The new the new the enactment or enforcement, this will start on 01/01/2026. So it will enable DPW to actually reach out and provide notice to those individual comms firms that are leasing from us. It will require that first time registrations will pay a fifteen hundred hour fee that we did not have before that will enable us to have recovery of initial upfront processes. We will have a mandatory submission of operations plans on an annual basis that will require the comm firms among other things to provide detailed maps of where all their fiber is located in our conduit system.

It will require them to provide an annual update of the total footage they occupy as well as providing us annual updates on anticipated projects to allow us to better plan for the expansion efforts. And finally on enhancing enhancing policing authority and this is one of the areas that I highlighted earlier dealing with the efforts on the outstanding receivables. It will provide designation to the commissioner of public works and provide enhanced authority under that office to oversee conduit use including the power to determine and to determine and and establish actions on upon violation. Some of the policing powers that will be vested under the commissioner include the ability to prohibit or limit placement of of individual fiber requiring license agreements in order to occupy. Withhold the ability to withhold permits to change to establish changes for unpaid occupancy to order the removal and to terminate agreements.

Additionally, we will provide a $500 permit review fee and structure penalties for those who do unauthorized work. Among the things is if you do work that is not within the bound bounds of a permit, you will see a doubling of of that permit rate. And additionally, this this ordinance provides mandatory requirement for collection referral. It also adds the state maximum law of a 1% monthly interest on any outstanding fees that are owed and as previously mentioned allows denial permits for occupants with outstanding collections of the city. And one of the questions that when we were going in and had the discussion was, does this routinely happen and some of the firms are routinely getting additional permits and seeking additional expansions.

Well when they owe us money, we should have the ability to deny those permits. There are a number of other smaller technical changes. Mister Lee could provide additional questions to that, but that provides kind of a general overall summary. We did we did bring this new proposed change to the comptroller's office. There is a fiscal note. It it does anticipate about five hundred thousand hours of new revenue that would be incorporated into next year's budget. With that, I'm happy to answer any questions and if you have other technical questions of DPW, mister Lee would be happy to address them.

Any questions from the committee?

Yes, sir. Go ahead. Thank you. And I know that it's sent over to to finance and personnel, but what what are some what's some examples of some of these companies that that owe us some of these telecom companies?

Charter Communications owes us about $4,630,000 One of the aldermen and also joining the the committee here today, if there are specific questions, is Dylan Westfall, who is the Department of Public Works business operations manager who actually oversees the AR and OR accountables. We have seen and Charter seemingly in a bizarre manner is issued on an annual basis based on what we determine the the extent of of their occupancy in our city's conduit. A fee of about $767,100,000 dollars on an annual basis. And and at least from what I have seen in my discussions with DPW, on annual basis they continuously send us a check back to the tune of about $460,000 indicating that they are going under a previous cost that they believe that that they are relegated under. And so when we talk about the policing powers

Mhmm.

All of the old agreements will be tossed. So in order to continue to occupy the city's conduit system, you will be under a new agreement with new rights and there will be no second guessing because you will have to sign in order to continue to occupy. The the the commissioner can request you to be removed if you don't want to adhere and then we will certainly, like, try to employ additional tools including the ability of running a clock of interest on them for outstanding debt and making sure that collections are are employed. But collectively, the the, you know, one example was Charter, Midwest fiber owes about $534,000. Verizon, MCI WorldCom, 206,000.

Unity fiber, 282. And there are a few others as well. But collectively, I think based on the the the most latest review, it's about $6,000,000 that is out the city.

Mister Chair. Yeah. Go. Sure.

Yeah. Thank you. No. And I really appreciate you sharing all this. I mean, obviously, like, you know, when when these when when a consumer owns these owes these companies money, they'll they'll cut people off right away without question. So it's good that we're taking steps to be able to do that right back to them. Thank you.

Any other questions? Alright. The motion by Alderman Taylor is passage. Any objections? Hearing and seeing unso ordered. Thank you.

Thank you.

Moving on to item 14, file number 250696 communication transmitting the rail transit system safety status report for calendar year 2024 to the Milwaukee Common Council. Nobody's here for that item. Do we know who's close to Joanna? Anybody? I don't speak to

him. Okay.

Happy to.

Good morning. Good morning.

My name is Eric Stagbar. I'm with the Wisconsin Department of Transportation. I'm the state safety oversight manager overseeing the safety program for the streetcar. And what the file is before you is a report that we have to generate each year and transmit to the FTA administrator, the governor, and the board of directors for the rail transit agency, which is the common council. And so FTA has asked that we have a direct line of transmission to those bodies and then can generate a transmittal letter that we can then upload to their system each year so that they can see that that process was completed.

So, this is just a new method by which we're transmitting an annual safety status report to those bodies to help our federal partners understand what's happening.

Any questions from the committee? Alright. Motion is by Alder Rower to place on file. Place on file. Thank

you. Thank you much.

Moving on to item 15. File number 241224. Motion relating to the recommendations of the Public Works Committee relating to licenses.

Good morning. Good morning, chair. Committee members, Jim Cooney, license division. So this file is the recommendation of the public works committee relating

to

licenses. There are two licensed applicants before you. Chair, if you'd be so kind to call them. If they're here, we can get them under oath. And then they're both scheduled on police reports so we can address those.

The first is Jamiko j Wilson for public passenger vehicle driver's license application. Is Jamiko present? Doesn't look like it.

Chair? Yep. We've not heard from the applicant. This is their second non appearance.

Okay. The

motion by Alderman Baumann is denial. Any objections to that motion? Hearing and seeing on so order. Second is Michael J Klitska. Public passenger vehicle driver's license application. Is Michael present?

Chair, we've

not heard from this applicant either. Okay. Is that is this is the first non appearance.

That's your motion? Motion by Alderman Baumann is denial. Do we have any objections to that motion? I do object.

We should we should wait. Do

we should we do a

roll call on

that? Is that

Well, I guess no further. Typically, nobody shows up for these.

I don't think we've

had an appearance in many, many, many months, if not years.

The only

ones that show up are the ones that are active that have complaints against them.

Sure. So alderman Bowman's correct. Typically the people that do show up are the folks that have taxi cab licenses that the drivers don't tend to. It's been the history of of past committees to typically hold on the first non appearance, but certainly it's it's your decision.

That's fine. I don't care. Whatever.

So you were sending that motion?

Yeah. Sure. These people aren't coming

in. Alright.

So we're going to the motion is alder Woman Cox to hold.

That's fine.

Any objections to that? Hearing and saying none, it's ordered. You.

Mister chair? Yes.

I would like to be recorded any affirmative of any files that I missed.

I think that was just thirteen and fourteen.

Thank you. Thank you. And then

you have to make a motion for the actual file to approve.

Okay. And the motion for file two four one

two two four is approval

by order woman Taylor. Thank you.

Item number 16, file number 250077, Resolution assigning the official street name Nevada Davis Way to North 14th Street from West Capitol Drive to West Cornell Street in the first automatic district. Auditwoman Pratt.

I was gonna ask if this could be held.

The the motion by alderman Brower is to hold to the college chair. Are there any objections to that motion? Hearing none, so ordered. 17, and our final file is file number 250678, communication from the Department of Public Works relating to protocols for and responses to flood events. This is sponsored by Alderman Perez, myself, and other woman Pratt.

Thank you for joining us, commissioner. We all know that recently, we were hit with what I'm hearing was a thousand year flood that unfortunately devastated some parts of the city and definitely impacted the lives of many of our residents. So I think this file is fitting for us to talk about what the departments have done, are doing, and plan to do to assist residents. But this is led by president Perez. So did you wanna speak to it before the departments begin to present?

No. I I just wanna thank them for being here, and we know from this historic event that some neighborhoods were, you know, were hit worse than others. There was a lot of people in the neighborhoods that stepped up and we wanted to take this opportunity to, you know, let the department talk about, you know, what was done, the amount of effort they put in. We know a lot of people put in a lot of hard work. We appreciate all the city departments including especially DPW who stepped up and and you know, not to be critical but most importantly really realize how prepared were we, lessons learned, how do we move forward.

And I know that we want to make sure we have all the systems in place. We have conversations happening now about emergency management and how this plays into enhancing everything that we want to accomplish and, you know, many members of the council that are here today really wanna figure out how we codify as much as we can so no matter any of us leave, that there's things in place that we can we can follow systematically.

Thank you, president Perez. I know this is also sponsored by order woman Pratt. Did you have any words before we turn it over to the departments?

No. Just kinda echoing the same sentiments of thanks for the people who stepped up, for the departments that stepped stepped up. I was able to see route wear in action while while out there and talk with many DPW workers who were out picking up and are still out doing a lot of pickup. So just very thankful and just yeah. That's really it. Just wanted some follow-up on on what happened during the flood and and how we responded and how we can maybe make improvements or, you know, where we need to course correct if we need that.

Thank you.

Yeah. Sure. Good morning, Alderman Cogs, chair member or committee members. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna basically go through what the intensity of the the event was that happened on the night of August 9 through the tenth and give a summary of the impacted households that we know from DPW standpoint and then go through our procedure from basically the ninth all the way through what it looks like today. And then I can go into some of the details of, you know, the coordination with other departments that are behind me as well and why we did certain things.

So obviously, the rainfall started on August 9. On the north side of the city, which is near kind of Timmerman, there was record number of inches of rainfall, which is about 14.5 inches or 14.55 inches. Just to put that perspective, a typical summer in the Milwaukee area probably is 12 an entire year. So you're kind of condensing that. We've seen almost 3.7 inches of rainfall per hour for a short period of time. So it's almost like a mini burst. On the South Side, we've seen nearly 6.69 inches. So it was sporadic around the city. I will say that the entire city was impacted by flooding. Obviously, neighborhoods, if you're near an adjacent waterway or if you're in lower depression areas, you've seen a lot more affected households than you would in some others.

But I know in high areas, would see random houses that would have one or two bulky waste at the corner, and those will continue to come out during the day. So just to put some numbers into perspective, our sewer crews responded to 1,900 calls for basement backups, 230 calls for surface ponding catch basin kind of blockages that kind of come through. We had 275 circuit outages during all over the city basically because of saturated soils. So no matter if it was a multiple circuit or a series circuit, both kinds of circuits were affected. So that means our modernized circuits or our old circuits, both were impacted.

We had 458 emergency calls for service tree service based on saturated soils and trees down in branches and limbs. We had four seventy four vehicles that were relocated during the event. So basically, this impacted the first couple of days. We had stranded cars with obviously, flooding would happen in intersections that were stranded that we relocated off to the side. We did not tow those to the tow lot.

We gave our residents an opportunity to remove those cars till Thursday because we did not wanna just penalize anybody who was impacted by flooding. We had 15 of our own city vehicles that were damaged. We had three bridge city bridge structures that were damaged as part of this, a lot of scouring and undermining. We had 20,000 plus minus households that we collected bulky waste from. This is where you have the collection at the curbside.

So that's 20,000 homes across the city that we physically went and picked up. Additionally, we had 28,000 cars that went through our two drop off centers. And and this is one thing I want to to put together. The DPW folks did a fantastic job at curbside, but the community helped out a ton. By having them actually take in their own flooded material to our drop off centers, which sometimes those waits were, you know, an hour or two hours long in the beginning, helped us basically take care of this.

So if you've kind of put those two numbers together, that's about 48,000 things that were impacted to our folks. The size of bulky items, this wasn't like I put a sofa out the end. These were entire basements. Sometimes they were entire households that we were picking up. There are there are areas that we had 20 cubic yards in someone's front house that we had to pick up, and you'd spend forty five minutes to an hour on one house.

So the the intensity was different across the city. That's over 11,000 tons of extra material that we had to process. We had 707 crew shifts working from August 11 to September 3, basically over twenty two thousand extra hours that we were putting in towards this. So how this kinda unfolds is Sunday, the rain started. We got calls that came into our forestry department and obviously our sewer crews because Saturday. Saturday night. Yep. Sorry. Yeah. Saturday, August 9. So forestry calls started coming in, obviously, because there's wind damage and saturated soils. Sewer crews began working on catch basin flooding. That was late Saturday night. OEM kinda put a call together at basically 01:00 in the morning. That's citywide office of emergency management.

We got together because DPW's priority at that point because we did not know the impacts in the middle of the night was to get rid of stranded cars. So our parking enforcement folks were navigating tow trucks to remove them out of the public right way where we could. Now there's a lot of intersections that we couldn't touch until at least twelve to twenty four hours later because they were still underwater. We weren't gonna send a vehicle in there to try to tow someone out if there's active flood water coming through. So at 01:19, this is when parking was kinda doing their things.

We relocated about 98 cars in the beginning. And of course, that continued for the next forty eight hours. We Sunday morning, we noticed that we had an a DPW wide management team that kinda went together separate from the OEM team to analyze what sort of damage and and started triggering our folks. So what happens there is we noticed Canal Street, is where our fleet department is, our electrical services was completely underwater. So we're trying to strategically think like how are we gonna get our fleet vehicles out to to help the community if we can't access those two yards.

Fortunately, by when it hit Monday, the water receded so we can access both yards. There were flooding that occurred there, not a lot of damage to those properties. We did see a lot of ballast and everything from the rail yards that are down in the valley that we had to clean up, but it was not hugely impactful at least, which was a positive as we kind of went forward. We had contamination in some of our Lincoln fuel yards. So basically, we have underground tanks at supplier fuel vehicles that had to be flushed out and re put there because obviously the flood water impacted underneath. We have and and this is something I think the public didn't really know is we have two compactors at our drop off centers. One's at we have industrial rotary of four. We have another two that sit at Lincoln Yard. So what that is is we bring in debris that comes into those yards. We compact that and then ship it out to a landfill.

Both of those compacting sites were destroyed during the flood. So we had zero compacting ability, which means part of our operation was direct hauling to landfills, which is something on the backside the public didn't notice and there was not an impact there. But for our operation, it put a lot more stress on our folks because we couldn't just compact send out. We were sending garbage trucks and packers all the way to the landfills, which if where the locations are large, you have one at Maui Falls, have one on the South Side. So there's And some of those waits were over two hours.

So we're And I'll kinda go through why we made some decisions we did later on because of the impact there. Instantly, we knocked off street sweeping because it's the lowest priority. We kind of pivoted those people into getting into refuse packers, etcetera, to start dealing with bulky waste, a decision we made on Sunday. Additionally, which folks don't know is we got a hold of our entire structural design section to start going out and evaluating the bridges because, obviously, floodwaters can do some extreme damage, and we wanna make sure that people can safely drive over the bridges. You know, the city has a 188 structures, so we sent every single structural design team out there to evaluate to see if there was any impact, which we noticed there was three bridges along the KK River that had some major scouring.

Not impactful to cars going over, but we did shut down two of the pedestrian bridges until we could get a contractor out there. So and then we decided on Sunday as well when we normally have the drop off centers to open it up right away. So internally, he says, it's usually shut down on Mondays. Let's open up right away. The early people that could address their are going to be aggressive and get out there, and it was.

You know, a lot of people didn't even know what was happening to their homes until Sunday or Monday. So we we were kind of planning what we would see coming in. So if you figure the event happened Saturday into Sunday, people are gonna figure out what's going on Sunday to Monday, and you're gonna see also bell curve, and you're gonna see people start emptying out their basins, which did happen. I'll kinda go through some of the details there. On Monday, we obviously announced that we were gonna have free drop off at both of our drop off centers until August 17. And so we weren't gonna put a particular date and go until October. We're kinda planning this week by week because we didn't know the impact. Because on day one, you're like, okay, there's a few 100 out there. But as this progressed, this is why we kept on extending longer and longer hours, giving an opportunity for second shifters, etcetera. This is when we decided to do a curb curbside free bulky pickup.

Collection had started. Overnight parking, we decided to suspend until that next Thursday night or Friday morning 2AM to 6AM because the impact of folks that had their cars staying in the in the public right of way, we didn't want to kind of penalize from that. So what we did do is we utilized our night parking enforcement to identify where bulky waste was across the city, which helps us put into our software to route crews the next day. The goal when we were trying to pick this up the bulky waste was to hit the highest impacted areas first, and we started to build and create heat maps. So as you started seeing long stretches, and I I I know all over in Pratt, we were out there.

There was there was six or seven blocks where every household was impacted, so we tried to move over there. That doesn't mean we just prioritized one area. We did have a north, central, and south attack team going through, but we're trying pivot to the most hardest hit areas. Regular garbage collection still remain the same. So we wanted to have a bulky waste attack team and we also wanted to have regular garbage collection because there are some people that didn't have highly impacted flood damage, but they're still going to have natural waste.

And if we would have knocked off regular sanitation, it would have been a nightmare. And what we did with our regular garbage collection services is we also had them put into what we call route where there's some details we had in an earlier press conference. They would actually identify where bulky waste was so they could help put it into the system to help navigate those skid crews as we move forward. And it kind of draws the picture of of what the city impact was. By about 03:00 on Monday, that's when our relocates kind of ended.

That means when we're getting all those distress cars out of intersections in the right of way to make sure traffic flows. So really they put in nearly 36 to get those cars relocated off to the sides. And then this is where we started to see the impact of electrical services where they started to begin to get into overtime because at that point they had 90 troubles and that kind of continued over the next three weeks. And then we dispatched on Monday street services to evaluate roadways that had washouts. We had some sewers that had some collapsing.

We had some washout and underbining in some roadways. Ideally, our infrastructure held up quite well for the thousand year flood as they're calling it. So only have three bridges impacted and some of the waterways and some of our facilities was not bad. So I mean, from a facilities and damage standpoint and infrastructure, we actually voted pretty well compared to people's private residence. So as we move on into Tuesday, August 12, we had an additional storm that came through with about an inch of rain that caused additional tree damage.

So if mean, you configure this, you have saturated soils that exist, and now you put the this storm is only an inch, but it's still an inch when we already had flooded waterways. And you already you had high winds that kind of tied to this. So we had to dispatch our forestry crews out there to address another 400 and some odd calls that were associated with that second mini storm. We decided Tuesday we started to see the inflow of the public come through. We extended our hours because we started to hear complaints like, why work first shift?

I can't access these drop off centers from seven to three. So we decided, okay, let's extend this till 06:00 to give those second shift or first shift folks an opportunity to use these drop off centers because it was a help to us that we didn't have to pick it up at their curbside. And then this is where, as I mentioned before, we were direct hauling all our garbage to landfills and it was a decision late at night going, we have to figure out how we get more refuse packers and get more skids to address the amount of bulky waste that's sitting at the curb. So by Wednesday, August we gave the green light to knock off recycling, which we did on Thursday. And so the reason why we knocked off recycling is because you have a packer that's basically taking care of your solid waste and you have another one that's taking care of recycling.

But because we were hauling this material to a landfill, you would have a skid that would sit there in idle. So basically given that opportunity to have another packer there, the one could run and I have another one can continually fill. And that's the reason why we knocked up recycling. I know it was, you know, inconvenient for the public as we basically missed cycle for everyone. So there's a month there that was not recycling because we usually do it every two weeks. But to get into the amount of bulky waste off the roadway was probably the best decision we did. Otherwise, we'd be still dealing with it today. So Thursday, recycling was suspended. Thursday, also brush collection collection was was suspended. Forestry started to ease up their operations tied to the storm two point o.

So they put over three skid steers from forestry and then signed to the sanitation. Additionally, our morning meetings every 8AM, we had folks from all over the city. So our street maintenance folks were moving over to sanitation. We had sewer maintenance folks were moving to sanitation. We had basically anybody we could possibly get that wasn't an essential service to really focus on cleaning up the city as quick as possible. Moving into Friday, parking enforcement resumed at 6AM. I was quite pleased because the 400 or nearly 500 cars that were stranded, almost every one of them moved from a resident, not necessarily us, which I thought was good. We kept on putting out public information like, please move your car. You have until Thursday, give folks time. And we towed very few of those, which was a positive.

We decided on Friday that the free drop off center and bulky pickup, which should be extended until the '20 because the volumes are still increasing as we kind of think of that bell curve we're watching this go through. And then Friday is when contracted skid steers, dump trucks started in sanitation. At a time, we peaked up with 45 additional contractor help in skid steers and dump trucks to to help with efforts. Because what we found is even with the amount of refuse packers we have, we didn't have enough. So this is where we started to use Prentiss loaders, which basically are large arms that pick up debris and and dumpsters along the city to help do that work because it was just so much at the at the end of the week.

So what a cleanup crew type is is we have a skid steer. So if you want to see like a little skid steer with a packer, so what they're they're gonna pick up like a gravel, they're gonna put it in the back of a refuse packer and then move on. That's kind of one of the operations. And we're using two packers to one skid steer to keep things moving. Another operation would have been like we had a Prentice loader, which I was saying like a long arm that comes out.

We usually use that for large tree pickup. And then they would put that into a dumpster and they were we use that with a roll off box. And then there's the other third type of operation. We get into alleys where we can't use some heavy equipment or big stuff where we're actually having folks who are hand loading into refuse packers because of some tight areas and how much material there actually was. Our folks continue to work basically seven days a week, anywhere from twelve to fourteen hours every single day.

A lot of volunteer bases. And a lot of our folks were like, yes, we'll do it. I had never seen more pride from this department or the people that are out there that wanted to help. I it's proud to say, I mean, I have nearly 75% of our folks that still live within the city, and they wanted to help their community or help their friends or their neighbors or their families. It was it was unbelievable. And I think that's kinda what I took up from leaving this department for the past three years, which was great. Sunday, the seventeenth, the drop off centers was the last day we decided to go to 6PM. And the reason why we stopped at 6PM is because we've seen the volume start to drop. So we weren't seeing the impact necessarily at the drop off centers. And to relieve some of my folks and give them a little bit of rest, we started to go back to normal hours.

That does not mean we didn't stop. We put those efforts towards the actual bulky waste that was happening at curbside because that's where we've seen the biggest impact after the drop off centers started to get back to, I'll call them, normal volumes. We were still seeing flood material, but at three, 04:00 in the afternoon, you could walk in there and there wasn't a line. So it's like, why do we keep our folks here? Let's just get them at the curbside. As we move into Monday the eighteenth, drop off centers, we still opened on the Monday when we're normally closed, but just went back to 07:03 like I mentioned. Forestry staff kind of all moved over. We stopped doing boulevard maintenance, which we usually do. This is your grass cutting. This is your kind of pulling weeds.

We moved all those folks back into sanitation to try to help. We also had six county trucks that came in to assist us. We had conversations on that late Friday with the county and says, how can how can they assist us? And we had a couple of ways. Like, we just need more vehicles to actually get rid of debris and also if we could have some help electrical services.

So they were gonna put some electrical people that didn't know our circuitry, but we had them during traffic signals as well. Moving on to to Tuesday, we finally got one packer one compactor up at Industrial Road on the nineteenth to function, which started to help us get rid of the huge volume. I don't know if anybody had seen pictures online or at our self help centers, but we had probably 15 foot high piles, hundreds of feet wide, full of debris that we were trying to continue to call up. It was quite an amazing picture to see what's going on there. And then basically the twenty first, the free drop off centers, we extended again until August 31 because we're still seeing the impact and folks still coming into both of our drop off centers.

Friday, August 22, trucks offloading at Lincoln resumed, which was good. So this is where we started to take all that debris that was sitting in both of our self help centers and started to reduce the size. And by Tuesday, the twenty sixth, we finally had our sixth compactor that was up and running. Truck started offloading at industrial rooms or or industrial road resumed, and electrical services finally caught up with the basically, all the electrical service area wide outages, which was about 275 by August 26. As of August 28, we resumed recycling.

So we started pulling folks off. Now, we knew there was still curbside debris that existed, but not to the impact that it had been before. And the decision to go back on a random Thursday is because that means that every single resident across the city missed one cycle of recycling. So then we got back into that because we started to get complaints like, I have overflowing recycling containers. So we decided to go back into the operation September 4. We started getting back into brush collection cause we knew there was debris from the floods that was occurring and wanted to get that back up and running as well. And then we just got back to almost full normal service as it sits today. We are still addressing some curbside pickup that sits there. We know there are some folks that are out there today that have not even gotten into their basins. I did a walk through over with Alderman Chambers.

And midway through this over like a sixty second lawn, I seen like eight basements that were just blown out, entirely blown out. And hearing the stories from the that were there was just amazing of how they even made it out of there. But they haven't even got in there yet, and I've witnessed that today. And so, you know, those folks that have had flooding issues that haven't been able to access this, give us a call. We can accommodate you as much as possible.

But right now, I know there's some places structurally they can't even get into at this point. The services we delayed during this whole process, obviously recycling brush, boulevard maintenance, tree trimming, street maintenance, the whole entire department pivoted to basically an emergency response form. And so when we look at things that we did correctly and things that we can do in the future, I will say that on that Saturday night before that occurred, you know, we're expecting maybe four inches of rain, which we do every single storm. Get together and say, okay, how are we going to plan? And it usually comes into it could be a snow and ice operation. It could be into a forest operation. So we have folks on staff. So we're ready to go. That 01:00 in the morning, I think I gotta call it midnight on that Sunday. This is when the OEM everyone activated.

So we're getting information from, you know, MFD, MPD to how to kind of pivot across a city. So we acted pretty quickly. Now when how how can things be better in the future? It's tough. Because when you get into a natural disaster, you don't know what it's going to look like. You don't know the areas that are impacted. And all you can do is constantly pivot and get information. I will say, I know there was some criticism earlier of why we didn't put out, you know, boxes in everyone's neighborhood. That's a question that had come up. So the answer to that is multiple.

One is, is we're using those boxes because we couldn't basically use our compactors to get rid material. Two is we're using those boxes also to use with our skid steers, which is that part of that operations and apprentice loaders. And three, the information in the first week where we were utilizing these individual households that were impacted from bulky waste, that information is related to our partners at the health departments, Department of DNS, and the fire department to figure out how they can address those impacted properties. So the tools we were getting, so all these individual properties, the information was going to our peers going, do we need to send someone out there from a fire perspective and get someone a life safety issue? Is there a structural issue from a Department of Neighborhood Services?

And some of that, if you put a week in a box, we would have never known that. So you would have had a bunch of folks jumping into a box and we wouldn't know where that was coming from. So there was an advantage. We were additionally more efficient by not putting a box out into the neighborhood and collecting at curb. A, we weren't having folks lift up heavy stuff into dumpsters and getting injured. And what we found out in the past, because we do a weekend box program. If you put a box out there, they're just going to continue to pile on it. There's debris all over the place. It's not as efficient. We ended up cleaning the city up much quicker than our peers across in adjacent cities and they were asking us for help afterwards, which was quite amazing considering we have 96.2 square miles.

We have more residents than anybody else in Milwaukee County. So from an operational standpoint, I'm not sure what we can change. I do say that the active communication twice a day with my team and also the twice a day that we had with other departments was very valuable. So talking to our folks at fire, police, DNS, everyone's asking how can we help. So it wasn't just a DPW thing.

It was a how can we all help as a team and then how we basically make sure that people are not stranded somewhere. You know, there's probably gonna be questions related to our sewer system and and MSD probably has the same kind of concerns. You know, how are you know, a thousand year flood, there's not a municipality in the entire world that builds for a thousand year flood. Not one. And if you decided to do that, there's not enough money in the world to get that, to be honest.

I mean, sewer systems based on historical data are built on ten year floods, and sometimes the hundred year floods are not as impactful. And maybe there's some minor flooding that occurs. Or if you think of roadways, they're they're made to flood and that's what they're supposed to do but not to get into people's homes. You know, for us to even go up to a hundred year flood plain is an astronomical amount of money. I mean, I will tell you since the February, I mean, the past fifteen years, the amount of green infrastructure, the amount of improvements in the sewer system, the amount of things that MSD has done has reduced the amount of impact that we've had in our community.

So if we wouldn't have done the things that we have done over the past fifteen years, it would have been much worse. It's hard to tell the public that piece of information, but the stuff we are doing has helped out. You know, when you're near you know, we are fortunate enough to be on multiple rivers from Honey Creek to Lincoln Creek to the Menominee River to Milwaukee, so we have fresh water all over. But when you get this amount of rain coming down this fast, it has nowhere to go. And it's unfortunate.

We are just happy to be a part of basically recovering what our citizens had occurred. I will tell you that I have more than half of my department that had impacted the same as the residents they were dealing with. I have folks that had six or seven feet of water in the basement. They were still coming to work at 6AM in the morning and then trying to go home after an eight to ten hour shift and bail themselves out. But they came to work every day.

I had barely anybody call in during this whole event, which to me is quite amazing when you're sitting there with three or four feet of water in your own basement and trying to help the rest of the community. I will say that, you know, as as I won't speak on behalf of the office of emergency management by any means, but there was constant internal conversations that were occurring on an hourly basis. Not only from text message, emails, but actually in person meetings and virtual meetings of how do we work together to make this happen. From that, I'm willing to answer any questions for committee or any of my colleagues who'd like to come up as well.

Thank you. I think we'll have questions for you first and then bring up the other department if that's so talk about the coordination between the departments. Who was in charge of that coordination? Like, who was the point person?

Yeah. So that's Ryan Zollicoffer. So he's the one who sets it up, which is obviously the city's office of emergency management and sends an alert. So it was that Saturday night, I went to bed at eleven and I was up at midnight. So minimal sleep, and this is where the calls come in. It's like, this is the impact, and so we all start discussing.

When you began, you talked about how our own fleet was submerged on Canal Street. Does this experience make you think that maybe we should keep fleet somewhere else?

I would love to have all my facilities off of Waterway for many reasons, but from a fiscally responsible budget perspective, I don't know if it's plausible, but it's something we would like to move in the future. When we look at all of our facilities at DPW, and we're in charge of like 200 buildings across the city. And that one's in the least disrepair. So, I mean, there's other priorities. If I had an electrical services building that's in the valley that's adjacent to the waterway that had some flooding, I would like to move that one first. But everything's on the table.

Or is there things we could do around those facilities that might lessen the impact of a storm in the future? Future.

Yeah. That that that's a tough one, being right there on the Menominee River and the amount of volume it came in. Because the whole entire valley was flooded. I mean, it looked like a sheet of ice, you know, from an aerial view. Are there things we can do? You know, you can start building levee walls and things like that along that, but I don't think it would be it wouldn't be for us to even do that, I think it'd be more easy to move and relocate than it would to actually do something like that.

Any questions from committee? Yeah.

I just in the like, even though I wasn't affected as as much as I thought I'd be living right next to the KK River, in the communication internally or or the system in place, How do you get information to all those who are getting complaints, requests for assistance, not knowing where to go, what to do, who to call? How does how does that get incorporated into the into the communication system in an emergency place? I was texting you guys. Yeah. I saw the river

come up. Yeah. One third of the Yes. Yeah. Like

Who what do I do? Who do I call? And other neighbors were calling me and

Yeah. So when the event is happening, this this is where it's it's interesting because it can be in the middle of the night and obviously, you know, president president and had a conversation, think it was 01:30 in the morning. It's like, what do I do? And at that time, I mean, really the department I mean, an individual can get sandbags, but at that time it's coming up so fast that it's tough. So really the reaction comes in as what is the aftermath? During it, you're like basically trying to get information even from the news to just stay away from flooded waterways and just make sure that your own personal safety is a priority. What we started to do as a department is we were putting out messages of our operation on a daily basis. So we're doing two facts. One, were going to the public and giving them kind of like the cliff notes version of our operation. The second was we're trying to get the alders going, here's some more details at least assist with residents throughout there because there's a lot of things happening and moving at the same time.

But during a flood or a natural disaster, it's tough because all you want is someone not to have life threatening injuries and so to basically stay away. You know, the department or the city, it's there's nothing we can do during a in a flood like this is because if you do get in some of that, I mean, our folks or our personnel can get basically harmed or or or killed as well. So I don't have a great answer for you, but really when you start, you know, researching, like, if you live near a waterway, always be cautious of like, could this happen again? But really it's just to stay away.

Okay. So you're here, but maybe I mean, I'm asking you this question because you're here, but I would think your your priority priority is is with with the the departments, departments, with your people on the ground triaging. Is there a bigger communication system that, I mean, you're funneling into that then gets to everyone else? I mean, I just I don't know if we have I'm not clear on like a a city kind of emergency communication strategic plan, period.

Gotcha. Yeah. I I don't if I can answer that one for you, but I agree. Hopefully, we'll get an answer.

My question, my district was hit fairly pretty hard in the area we walked in and where we were to 18th And 19th And Fairmount in the twenty ten flood, about 10 houses were lost in that area. So I know we talk about thousand year floods and hundred years floods, but fifteen years ago 10 houses were gone from the neighborhood. But I guess my question is, I was out that night, I was out the next day when the floodwaters were still there, you could see what who was affected. However, when that water receded, you didn't know who was affected unless they put their stuff on the curb. Mhmm.

And I still have I'm I'm happy to hear that you are doing some waivers where people are were unable to get stuff out because, I mean, I just was contacted yesterday by a 90 year old woman who could not get in contact with anyone to come to get the stuff out of her basement. She's her husband's 90, she's 72. So I guess my question is how did you determine what were the hardest hit areas? Because the only way I could tell is because I know where it flooded, where the water was on Saturday night and Sunday morning. And then when I went back, you know, a few days later, could see people started to put stuff on curves, I knew they were affected.

But sometimes it was also hit or miss because it would be out of this house and not out on any other house on the block. Maybe that's because that house had able-bodied people able to get it out. So did were you using the 211 calls to figure out where the call we know where people were, or was it was it based on where route where as they're going through and they're seeing they're tracking where those bulky loads were?

Yeah. So it's it's all the above. So ours was just an additional support. So when we had our sanitation crews out there noticing bulky waste or our parking portion, that was just supplement. So what we were trying to do is get folks to call in even if your waste wasn't at the corner. If if you were going call in and say, I'm going to have stuff there, that was 1. 211, we use that information as well. And as this thing developed and and and what the map looked like over days so day one is hard because no one knows when they're trying to get their stuff out there as quick as possible. And that's why I say once you get to that Wednesday, Thursday, you really start seeing a full picture. But we were taking all the data and kind of overlapping that and it all kind of mirrored the same.

It's like, here are the areas. And, you know, once it gets towards the end, could kind of see the flood materials starting to go downwards and you started to get other folks that were just, hey, I want to do some fall cleaning before winter. But for the most part, we were using every tool we could to identify what was there. And, you know, you would go on a particular block and you'd see 30 people there and you'd see six or seven that didn't have anything out and going, Why? And this is what helped us relay that information over to our partners going, Should someone be knocking on doors? Should someone see if someone's okay? Which was a huge advantage. But we were using every tool possible to kind of route through, not just our own.

Okay. Thank you.

Audrowman Tyler? Okay.

Oh, I have a lot here. So first, I wanted to say one thing that you mentioned how the community was out helping. Alder Woman Carter always tells me that kindness is contagious, and you see that when we have disasters like this. So I'm I was really glad to see that people were out helping each other. So I appreciate that.

And then I wanted to say thank you to you and to others, to other departments because really those kinds of things kind of start with leadership. And so the way that leadership handles things is determining the way that everybody else handles it. And from from my end, it looked like you guys were doing all that you could to work together to make sure that we address the issues as quickly as we possibly could. And so thank you to you and to others because the way you do your job kind of helps us do our job. So all the calls that were coming in to my office and probably to my colleagues as well, we were able to give folks answers.

We might not have been able to solve it right then and there, but we could say, hey, help is coming, and here's information. Here are numbers you can call. Having numbers for Red Cross available was great. Having numbers for teams that were going out and helping to relieve some of our seniors with things in their basement. Unfortunately, I had one senior who ended up paying out a large amount of money, and that was unfortunate because she didn't call me until after.

She had paid them, and then I told her that there was help available. So I really felt bad for that because there was no way to get her money back, but it was good to know that we had something called floodhope.org where these agencies were coming together, nonprofit agencies to help help folks. So I appreciate that pulling that all those resources together and being able to do that. There were and thank you for being able to pivot when those compactors went down because you're right. That is something that the community would not have known and that could have really hindered you quite a bit if you didn't find do we're then

And And

going able that's a lot of people, a lot of hours. I don't know what budget how that

So so to answer that question, budget was not in my mind. My my first reaction is is how do I help the community? Obviously, there'll be discussions later on as this goes through. So as a commissioner of public works, I have the authority with my staff to go into emergency mode, which just means that's where I start paying overtime to my folks. So anything outside of eight hours in a particular day, we started compensating overtime because it was just near there in an emergency response. It's the same kind of thing we do during a snow and ice event. So on a positive note, we deal with emergency situations more regular than people see. Not necessarily water related, but snow and ice. This is what we do. So we did compensate our folks.

There's a lot of overtime hours put in this. If we went to put overtime into this, I would still have bulky waste sitting at the end of people's driveways, which is unacceptable and also causes a health concern. So when we end up in the of the time, we're going to have totals. Rate on that Sunday night, we put a WK number in to track the number of hours put towards A, because we wanted to know and, b, because this helps us out with our FEMA claim. You know, what is our storm response? And so we have those numbers. And at the end, we'll be able to give totals. But our folks were compensated. And I would say that they volunteered. I mean, these folks are volunteering for fourteen hour days and they're going home and then coming in.

And the supervisors and managers that were operating this at lower level, they were coming in at 4AM and they were leaving at 10PM. And they go home and sleep for like six, seven hours and come in and do it again because they were ready to basically We had huge maps on walls, and I can probably show you some pictures as we're making sure we're touching every quarter section. You know, so, you know, it's it looks more archaic, but here's an exit. We hit, you know, five, you know, seven, six quarter section, move over to the next one, you know, because we wanted to hit the hot areas, but once we got towards the end of the operation, it's like, did we touch every single roadway? And even when we touched a roadway during this process, you would pick up on a particular roadway. Two days later, that whole entire block would be filled again. Yeah. And so we understood that. We wanted to make sure we were touching folks once. And so we somewhere we're getting some complaints later on, like, can you come back again?

It says, we understand, but there's other folks across the city that needed just our services as well. I will say that I will commend counsel, because I had lots of conversations with a bunch of you. And I was asking early on, you know, and maybe The Oleman Chamber story kind of strikes me the most is we had a conversation that Monday. He didn't know what to do. And you could see the emotion in his voice. He goes, I don't know what to do to help my community. And I says, let's just stop for a second. I go, I want you to just pick three blocks that are highly impacted where you see basically bulky waste of the corner. I go, we're gonna get that. So by day two, you can see that there's some sort of impact.

Even though when we look at all your districts, what there's, you know, 40,000 constituents roughly in each one of them, we know they're all affected, but you can show some progress. At least you have something to talk about. And those conversations were extremely valuable. I know I had the same conversations with you, Alderman Pratt. It was everywhere. So but if you could show some little thing, it was fantastic. I was extremely surprised when we got into week three and I had warned all of my folks, I go, People are going to become impatient. And I will tell you what, they weren't. They were not impatient. On week three I was out in the district and I was talking to our folks who were still smiling after working, you know, hundreds of hours.

And we were still picking up stuff at folks' properties and they're like, we're not upset at all. We're just thankful you're here. And that's three weeks later. So the patience of our community was unbelievable during this disaster and I I I was shocked because I was I was expecting blowback and I had been warning my folks just be patient with our residents because it does get a little frustrating when you're trying to address nearly a 100 square miles of the city and pick up bulky waste from someone's area and you have to wait three weeks. But I I would say we had so many emails, and I appreciate the ones that were forwarded over from your guys' offices, letters, cards that came in, and all we did is forward that to people that were in the field.

And that's what kind of kept them moving going. They did feel the appreciation and I think that's what kept their motor striving forward, which was fantastic. You know, I will say even today, two one one is still available. And there's a little story. I have a family member that called me just earlier this week and says, I have an impacted basement. And my history as a structural engineer and a carpenter by trade is and home inspector said, can you come over and look at it? And my first question to this individual was, is I go, did you call 211? Well, I didn't know I had to. And so I think there's still folks out there that aren't using that, and that call line is still available still for flood impact. Even if it's minor, that helps tell the story of how many folks were impacted tied to this.

I mean, you you see the 48,000 that have through from the ones that have dropped off our centers, the ones we've put at a curb, but there's many more that were affected. Was only a couple inches of water that didn't have to utilize those, were impacted by the flood. And I think that's the story we have to tell the city because it is devastating, the amount of materials and homes lost is part of this.

So I just want to end with, again, saying thank you for not forgetting that there are still people that are still impacted. And so I still get some of those calls too. Because even though we've gotten the bulk of things squared away, we still have some that are still suffering. So, again, like all the women press said, I I do appreciate that you guys still available to still answer those calls.

Okay. Thank you. Alderman Burkiewicz.

Thank you, madam chair. So, you're still compiling totals of the city's impact that might be FEMA eligible for our operational costs, for our infrastructure damage. Do you have a timeline when you expect that to?

So I have a rough number right now just in DPW because obviously when you when you're reporting to FEMA, this comes citywide. So there's other departments that are impacted, same with the county as well. Right now in DPW, we're looking at about $6,700,000. And that includes into basically, this comes into contractor work. This is our flood over time. This is the damage to our facilities, infrastructure, lost vehicles. That's what our total is at this moment, and obviously, that continues to adjust.

Thank you for that. Of the twenty two thousand extra hours of labor, how much of that was overtime?

I can get you that. I don't have it off the top of my head, but I can get you that information.

Other files coming next week in finance, regarding labor costs Sure. And and other impacts to the city, other, opportunities we have for residents, because collecting the hazardous materials and the bulky waste is step one. But there are 17 more steps for the city to recover from this. So, much appreciation, to you and your entire team for all of the hard work.

Any other questions from committee? Alright. And, again, thank you and your whole team for all of that work.

Yeah, madam chair. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. If we if we're if

we're about to finish this file, I just wanna also just make a few comments here. Just also just thank the DPW staff. I participated in a ride along with sanitation, after a few days after the some of the flooding where we did some garbage collection in Riverwest, but the employees there were ready after their shifts to go and do collections out on Lincoln Creek Parkway and other places that were affected. So all that staff just really, really saw a lot there, you know, from those folks. And, you know, I just wanna I think it's I think it's worth mentioning in this too that and I was just looking this morning at an article from the BBC from last November just about, the increases that we're seeing in severe weather events, know, can be directly related to climate change that's occurring, human caused climate change.

And I really think that we can do we should be doing as much as we can in a local level to mitigate the effects of climate change and to you know, and that society as well. Right? Like, what we need, in my opinion, is an economy that is run democratically where we can make decisions collectively to move to a carbon free economy so that we're not increasing the problems of climate change and to be more climate resilient here. Right? And and it's the and and when it comes to these kind of situations, we're seeing firsthand and facing the effects of what's happening when we have an economy that's built entirely for profit.

And we obviously need to be doing something about that, changing that system. That's capitalism. We need to move to a new system here. And, you know, honestly, the the investor class and the capitalist class is standing in the way of us taking action to stop things like this from happening. You know, locally, have an option as well under chapter one ninety seven to bring our utility, We Energies, which is a cause and a producer of climate pollution under public ownership. Thank you.

Thank you.

I'm going to selfishly ask, that we've done a lot of the pickup and the bulky waste pickup, are they back to doing street lighting?

Yeah. Yeah. Yes, they are back. So that's why I said late last week or the week before is when we basically caught up to our normal street light outages, which means there's always to be outages that kind of occur that we attack. But yes, they're back to normal, at least in their normal volume that they would see preflight.

Tell them come see Abami or

Rufus King. Will say I will

Madam chair?

Yeah. I'm wrong. To

what

extent do we coordinate with MMSD because, you know, even the the the their public facing web site has very interesting data on it. I mean they have rain gauges throughout the city, dozens of them and to me that was real time collection of I mean I could see where the where the rain was most intense just based on their rain gauges. In fact, I even texted Kevin Shaver, is this is this true? Are these rain gauges actually working?

Is it

They are showing 14 inches of rain in in the Northwest Side?

Yeah. He

said, oh yeah. Yep.

And the deep tunnel levels and the treatment plant levels and the So I mean, they would seem to be the best source of real time information as to how severe the problem is and where it's most severe.

Yeah, we have an open communication with MSD. So we were knowing what's coming. I mean, knowing what's coming or where it's at is different than reacting to what the damage is in the right of way.

We knew Yeah.

You can do

what I mean, right.

But we we know when we're gonna have to go to overflows and basically start discharging because, I mean, the deep tunnel is built not for flood mitigation, it's built for what the treatment plant can actually withhold. There's some misconception there. But there's constant emails that go back and forth and knowledge of what's happening from their perspective because they do have real life data of what's coming on in certain areas of the of the city. But, yeah, those conversations are always occurring.

Is there a representative from the soldiers that you care about? We did send an invitation.

Don't see anybody.

I happen to sit on a soldier, and alderman Baum is absolutely right. We just had a presentation. Was it Monday? And they had heat maps and everything of exactly how many inches where. And you're right. The worst was the 14 inches on the Northwest Side. But, yeah, they have really great data that people can use. And you're right about the misconception about the tunnels. Yes. And a lot of people are like, did the tunnels fail? And dah dah dah dah dah. I'm like, that's not How does

that happen? Yeah. I think that's some some folks are saying, did they open up gates to this and that? I mean, MSD nor the city closed any gates tied to this. I mean, everything was full. So when you see the impacts of this flooding, every sewer system, every waterway, it was all full. There was nowhere for it to go. So there's there's nothing that was the city nor the district did anything wrong by any means. So it's just I know there is people think that, and we purposely try to do certain things. That's not the case at all.

But one of the things Kevin Schaffer from the civil district did say, because he thanked alderman chambers, he was at the meeting, for publicly saying it about the efforts that citizens should make to keep the grates clean. Mhmm. He's like, it was so much water this time that some of this will happen anyway. Yeah. But on those smaller rains, some of the impact could be less if we did keep the the the grates cleaner.

Yeah. What's interesting to know about floodwater, so even if you are in your you know, by your resin, you have a a catch basin that's there and it's clean, because the water is pushing so much debris around, it ends up getting clogged even if it was cleaned prior to going there. And during the event, there was actually, obviously, community groups that were out there trying to actually flush some of these out, which was a huge help. And they were just trying to help their neighbors as well. So debris or not, when you see a pre event, it still was occurring afterwards because there's just the litter across the city.

It comes off of people's private residence or in the right of way. It just as much as people can pay attention to those as we kind of move forward, that does help. And I think that the site we kinda put out some press tied to that when storm two came on that Monday going, if you see it, this is the way you can help us. Some were still underwater, which obviously there's no help there because it was just backed up. But I I I think that is a PSA to everyone in the city. Like, you see a catch basin, just pick up a couple of things, put it in your, you know, trash receptacle, we move on. That's a help. And not knows not necessarily by the catch basin, but anywhere in the city. That helps all of us out. Alright.

I know we also have a couple other departments here. I 'm see DNS. I'm go and do gonna do that.

I

think we can go to let's go to fire next. You wanna give us your summary of what you did and what you're

doing? So obviously, the night of the floods, we were completely tapped out. And I wanna say in the first eleven and a half hours, we took six fourteen emergency assignments across the city, which I don't know that we've ever taken that crush of requests for service. These were not your average run of the mill responses. Although there was, you know, people still have regular stuff happen in the middle of these tragedies, which that just mounts it even more.

So we this storm did not come out of nowhere. We were receiving notices from the National Weather Service for the better part of twenty four to thirty six hours prior to this event hitting. So nobody should have been real surprised that we were hit with a storm then at nine, 09:30 at night whenever it started. So we had stood up a task force model, which the fire department has been doing for years now in collaboration with DPW or any other agencies that will participate or need to participate. And so we were we had our task forces all arranged.

And when it kicked off, we siphoned off calls so that the Department of Emergency Communications can continue to even process requests for emergency service. We siphoned off calls that would tend to be flood related, obviously prioritizing those life critical getting the as rapid a response as we could provide. At a certain point in this evening, we were sitting on about 35 water rescue runs that we just physically didn't have the capacity to respond to. What does that look like to the to the civilian who's waiting for service? We literally were arriving hours later to find people standing on the roofs of their car up to their calves in water just waiting.

You know, I I was a battalion chief in the two thousand and ten floods, I know that's not what we're discussing here. But the response during those floods was completely spastic and siloed and disconnected. And we didn't have any way to tap other departments for help or tap other fire departments for help.

In this case,

you didn't have any more fire EMS capacity in the city for many, many hours that throughout the course of that evening because we were just even with task forcing, the demand was just too high. So we requested assistance through the mutual aid box alarm system. We got help coming from Racine County, from Ozaukee County, and we were able to start drawing down all of the runs that we had in Cuba. The fire department does not like to put requests for service on hold. That's not our style.

We like to go and sort it out and move on. So to have all these runs in queue is not only is it just like doesn't match with my brain, it's not good for the people who've called for help. So we worked our way through that. And that very next day, of course, all the department heads are jumping on phone calls to start collaborating and organizing this effort now. And this continued on through the week.

I've got assistant chief Josh Parish here who he ran the fire department's portion of the emergency operations center, which was ultimately established by the Milwaukee County Office of Emergency Management out of a Glendale fire station. And it did a ton of work, assistant chief Parrish did, pulling together what might seem to be disparate data sets so that we could assist the system with prioritizing where were the hardest hit areas. And the route system that commissioner Krushky has detailed already, we were provided access to relationships that we've built with We Energies to where gas or electric disconnects had occurred. The two eleven systems, absolutely vital in this. We were able to pull that together with DNS information, health department information.

And quite frankly, I've to be real clear here, the health department built this incredible, I guess, a program or a dashboard. I hate using that word. It's overused. Everybody has a dashboard. But that allowed all the city departments to filter down and look at based on what their capacity or their response model was.

But I got a credit assistant chief Parrish with some very, very creative ways to determine with limited resources what can actually attack right now to do the greatest good for the greatest amount of people. So when we got through that first week, which was really still response mode at that time, we start inheriting because this is the way it works. I just run the fire department. He just runs health. The like, we all just we have our little portion of this pie here.

And then it has to go up through ultimately the county emergency management up to the Wisconsin emergency management and ultimately up to FEMA if civilians and or the municipality has any hope of compensation or emergency funding. We're still in the middle of that. So understanding nuanced language, this isn't over with yet. We're not ready to do an after action yet. We are very much in the middle of mountains of paperwork.

And so ultimately, then the week that follows, working very closely with Ryan Zolakoffer in emergency management, we pulled together a team and we've we everybody here is I just want to say this outright with much kudos to FEMA because we're still waiting to find out what the determination is. The the information flow can be a little bit surprising. Boom. Hey, we need two years of your maintenance records on your facilities all by tomorrow. And that's that's a huge lift for a a city the size of Milwaukee and a department with the complexity of DPW.

And that's just one department. Everybody has been very, very responsive and has to participate in this process. And each municipality must submit one packet, it's called a binder, which is basically like the entry level application so anybody can receive FEMA well, first off, so they can declare at the FEMA level that this is a disaster. We're still waiting. Thank you to your efforts with petitioning to have that declaration made because that must occur for emergency funds to be released.

But there are many steps, many which we still don't know. They're doing site visits yesterday and today again, I believe, to confirm what we've now reported to them. And so for the fire department, that seems like what is this guy talking about? We we threw a team together. Our the fire for the fire department's part and each one of our partner agents or everybody's partner agencies here participated in the damage assessments on private dwellings by the many thousands, including my department.

And that was done by people who were coming off shift and then put on overtime to go out for eight, ten, twelve hours a day and just walk neighborhoods assessments. And we also had to do a ton of internal evaluation on facilities by each department. Our problem in this city right now is not necessarily one of unwillingness. It is it will be a problem ultimately of capacity. And I'm just forecasting what I think a major problem will be when we look at how did we respond to this.

And at a certain point, we I agree with commissioner Kruschke. There there was not a capacity that we were going to throw at this in real time to stop water from infiltrating into base basements or 1st Floors or trapping people in cars. The it this was I was out on the streets in the two thousand and ten flood and I thought I had seen it all. And I was out and about for this one throughout the night and I've never seen anything like it. Extremely hazardous conditions.

And those conditions don't just disappear because the water has receded. We we are Milwaukeeans. We are Wisconsinites. And so we tend to try to look at the bright side of things and we have seen the water now recede and it quickly evaporates from our minds. And it can be easy to fall into the trap of, wow, this is all done now.

Not for everybody. Well,

I The pandemic You know what I'm saying? Like, it can just go away now. We are still very much in the thick of it and working with our partners. Obviously, we are far less in a emergency response mode and we are way more in a recovery and how can we get people back to normal. I don't want to steal commissioner DNS' thunder, but she made an extremely good point that a Monday morning huddle we all had that winter's coming.

And we have a ton of basements that were flooded where people are still sheltered. They have no they have no gas to their home. They have no electric to their home. And even if they get that back, those furnaces may not be fit for duty. That that is and commissioner Fotteritis said the same thing at the meeting. That is a life hazard if we get back now and people don't have heat in their homes. Ton of really excellent creative work is going on to get this thing going in the right direction. Thank

you. Alderman Baum. So the calls

from you, what what calls for service did you mean? You people were calling you to for the for the fire department to pull them out of a flooded vehicle? And how would you do that? I mean, your vehicles are not amphibious. Your vehicles are subject to water damages. See, I'm not sure what they what did you do in response to those calls?

No. It's it's it's a great question. So the Milwaukee Fire Department also has a dive rescue team and a

That's like two three three little boats. Right? I mean, you have a couple of inflatable rafts. Yes. I've seen those and

Yeah. We've got rigid haul inflatables. Right. And well, I'll just tell you what we did. We have we have one dedicated on duty dive team Yeah. Which is cross staffed on a ladder truck, which is one of the busiest ladder trucks around.

That's right downtown. Right?

That's correct.

Headquarter. Yeah.

So that immediately, it was determined that's not gonna work. We can't send a full dive response. We didn't have enough people to fill out the rest of what would be a normal dive response in the river or on the lake. So they split that team out and we just built mini response teams out of Suburbans. And we've got a variety of different methods. The rigid haul inflatables, we can tow those on a trailer. We can deploy those wherever we need to depending draft or the depth of the water. Part two, we've got what are affectionately referred to as Gumby suits. They're they're Mustang suits for first responders to enter water, it'll keep them afloat. So we do have those distributed around the department.

We also have the heavy urban rescue team, which is fantastic with ropes and has a lot of it for technical rescue. Very important.

All things, throwing people a rope basically who are standing on top of their car.

No. We don't just throw them

a rope.

We go get them. Well, I'm trying to get a heavy No. Like we what the fire department would do in a flood is kind of counterintuitive. You put fires, not flood, although you have pumping capacity. So I'm just trying to get a handle that you said you had 600 calls for service. 911 calls for service. I was trying get a handle for for what exactly?

Alright. So well, let's get to the first question. So my firefighters enter flood waters and carry people out. That's what they do. There is no other agency equipped or prepared to go do that. That's your Milwaukee Fire Department. So that's how we got people out. We didn't throw them ropes. Secondly, we had numerous fires. We had a greater alarm fire in Walker's Point. That consumes a ton of resources. 10 story cold storage building. We had a large industrial building on Industrial Road on fire. We were so out of resources. I had two battalion chiefs standing there looking at a burning building with no fire trucks there, and they had to just wait. All of your regular EMS runs Yeah.

Regular.

All that stuff was happening. We had people do call us when they are standing in their living room with water because they look out their front door and it's a river where once was a front yard and and they need help. So we would we would go and we would escort them to dry land. We'd get them somewhere. And on top of that, all kinds of calls for natural gas because as soon as you flood out a pilot light, especially on older furnaces, now you've got free flowing natural gas, another whole hazard.

Electrical trouble, you might imagine water infiltrating into the interstitial spaces in a building, sparking, arcing, smell of smoke, all those sorts of things. I feel like I'm missing something here, but one thing we don't do is we don't pump basements out anymore. That use that's a You used to do that? Way, way back in the day until we discovered that the water pressure on the outside of the block wall is much greater than the now pumped out interior and basements were collapsing. Sort of irritating to people and we say, no, no, no.

We don't the damage is already done. The water's already in the basement. Let it recede so that the there's equalized pressure on the inside and the outside. So we we don't really engage in that anymore. But those were the those were the sorts of runs. That the water rescue, the water in the home or I'm stuck in my home, the electrical and the natural gas would probably be the heavy hitters in quantity. And for capacity drawdown, the fires were huge.

Alderman Tyler? Yeah. Just on the back of that, I kinda was thinking along the same lines as Alderman Bowman because you said you used two outside counties, Racine and Ozaukee to come in and help? And were you able to get other firefighters who may have been off come in and get overtime? So so that's another big cost to the city that we're gonna have yeah.

I'm not not saying that it I mean, hey. Like commissioner Karski said, it's more important to think about the lives of people and and providing the support and the help. But I'm just looking at where we're going to be when we take a look at all the data. And and just wondering, because I, too, was sitting here thinking, like, well, I wonder how much help you guys were going to need to be able to be efficient in Sure. Dealing with the impact that we had. And so just with those two counties and with the overtime that we probably incurred, we had enough to go around and and pull people out of those basements and get them off the top of those cars and yeah.

So we we have incurred a ton of overtime.

Okay.

And I I don't have a number for you. I apologize for that today. But we've been very, very busy pursuing all of these things. And now with the various FEMA applications and information flow management between the city and county and FEMA, there's it continues. It's obviously dwindled because we're not out doing damage assessments on homes anymore.

We're not out hands on rescuing anybody anymore. But wouldn't normally request the mutual aid box alarm system resources. But in this case, was such a widespread generalized emergency. The rest of the county with whom we have shared services was also literally and figuratively underwater. So we we normally draw them in and that's a that's a net zero proposition.

Mavis is also net zero, the box alarm system. So when we jump outside, the only difference is is we don't work with them every day. But they hopped in their vehicles by the dozens and drove down into the middle of the city of Milwaukee and started helping us. And they just did that for one reason because we called and we asked. And so huge kudos to those fire departments and folks for getting out of bed and coming and helping us.

Thank you. Thank you. Any other questions for the fire department? Alright. Let's hear from DNS.

Oh, and thank you, chief, and your men and women for the the work that they did. I didn't have a lot of damage in my own district, but I was watching social media like a hawk. And I saw so many videos of people stranded on top of their cars waiting for you guys to to come and save them.

Go ahead. I thank you too. I don't wanna not say thank you.

Thank you. Go ahead, commissioner.

Good morning. Services. Pretty much the Department of Neighborhood Services has been put on the ground since the Sunday after the event starting on Sunday with just emergency calls to get people out in those properties that were structurally unstable. Overall, over the first week, the DNS participated in the assessment of the preliminary assessments of the properties, focusing in all the dwellings. Like as the chief informed, we use calls from 211, 09:11, everything, and then there was a creation around seven to different zones through the city and that was like assigned to different teams that will go and start knocking and going street by street assessing properties.

We did in the first week around 3,000 properties. We thought that that was enough then to create the report. That didn't mean that we not stop receiving calls. I would say that the total number as today for all the calls that have been received to two eleven reporting damages have been around 7,000 calls. With that in mind, there would be a report around 50% of major damages destroyed around 6%, 13% being affected, and 16 minuteors.

So it means, like, there was heavy impact in just in different categories. We have a team of 25 inspectors between residential, construction, condemnation, commercial, and trades, and all that was lead by the commissioner's office and two managers from trades and commercial. Overall, we are still all on deck, hands on decks, but this was the team that was directly involved with the emergency operation center. We also have four ninety five direct cases with DNS. These are calls that came just directly to us with that in mind about not hot water, no furnace, different reports of what is the damages that they've been having out there.

57 condemnation restoration agreement cases. This means that properties that were structurally damaged at this point. We have an additional 200 properties that are in the floodplain assessment that were not part of this initial assessment because there was no calls that we received. So this is an additional burden, right? But we have to do with it because it's part of the DNR requirements for those that are under floodplains.

After we do the assessments, we also need to do the scope of work and define the cost involved with that just to keep it as a report and understanding that when these people come from their permits, then we have the evidence and everything that is needed to the Department of Natural Resources. As briefly mentioned, DNS have been evaluating what are most of cases and what are the most important damages. I wanna take out what is the structural and significant damages on that side as we want to focus in this first three months of recovery. Right now, with those two eleven calls reports, there's around 900 that reported water heaters being damaged, 780 furnaces, and 200 for electrical panels in this function. So just to give you some numbers.

We have been working directly with some of the owners, homeowners as well and trying to identify what could be immediate relief funds for this affected homeowners because as we are mentioning, I continue to echo this message. Yes. Winter is coming, and what we are trying to do now is how to keep more more families in their homes that not have affected structurally, but do need really vital equipments to survive through wintertime. So that's kind of what we are now in the short term phase on identifying permits loads that are gonna come to the department, expedite those, also trying to evaluate to fees that will be involved to that that will be potentially waived to these homeowners just as a relief for their investments. The other one would be we're looking more into the compliance low program, which is a project that we have for get properties to code compliance.

We're trying to evaluate the possibilities of getting some funds through that site just for the immediate reliefs as I mentioned because it is important for us to give relief to these families at this moment. From the outreach perspective, we've been participating along with the health department and other departments in the multi agency research center. This is just a one stop shop assistance center for the disaster survivors and where we have provided information and service delivery. We've been also promoting more home safety. We have actually we even produce videos at the beginning during that first week of the flood of how you identify structural damages, what to do, what not to do, things in that matter.

So at least we continue to keep inform the community of what are the steps to be done post a flood event in this in this case.

Let me

see what else I have here. Think Ben Bapture? Yes.

Along those lines, you know, we we talked early on. I mentioned the loan complaint. If we don't get FEMA assistance or even if we do, it will not provide complete reimbursement or complete compensation. What is the city looking? Mean, we have two programs that are up and running. The strong home loan program, which is basically a home improvement loan that we underwrite, that we analyze, we have a process in place for that and of course the code compliance loan program which your department operate, the other one is DCD. Are we looking at ramping those up? I mean they're functioning, they're working now. All they need is more money basically. Are we looking at that possibility?

Yes, we are.

Okay. And who is? I mean, what what that that is that the budget office? Is that

We have a file coming to finance.

Yes.

Okay. Next week.

Thank you.

Yes.

How many houses have been declared? The dwellings have been declared uninhabitable?

At at this moment, have 54 cases.

54. Okay.

54 cases. And some of them are going to restoration agreements as I mentioned. We have at least, right now, five that are emergency raisins. They're not being able to be recovered at this point. Okay.

Has there been any thought given to because I know right after the flood, I think Lowe's and Franklin was giving stuff away to flood victims or whatever. Has there been any especially because you talk about the winter, and that's really making me think about the furnaces and all of that. Given given that some of these companies like the Home Depot, the Lowe's or whatever to maybe partner up and offer discount or something. You know what I mean? Has has thought given given to that?

Yes. I would say this event have really been very, very, very involved from the beginning and that has been one of the conversations that we're having as well. There's more to come in the next week. It's about that matter. We have even half contractors that have reached out to DNS offering donations of water heaters and labor.

So it's been a lot of good feedbacks on that side. I think, like, I personally have been responder in two hurricanes and one earthquake. So it was this started right on Sunday. All these conversations, it's just a matter now of starting aligning all the dots together. But, yes, that's that's been and I'm really, really hoping that after these cycles of committees, there's gonna be really more good news out there for the community.

We also been seeding as well with philanthropies and nonprofits organizations as well that have been doing amazing job out there. They've been a lot of help. And at the same time, we've been informing as well what are our findings so that way they've been collaborating and, like, flood hope was one of the the results on that. So it's it's been a very, very, very interesting collaboration of everybody, and we're just gonna continue on that part. I would say that even that DNS might seem like a very small department, all our inspectors, all our team has been all hands on deck.

They've been extremely helpful. We even have the motto and the mantra saying, like, we are addressing all this with empathy and understanding. And It's it's very different for everybody. Once you see the impact of this type of disasters, then you do understand that what are the real needs and what is our role as a department in the city of Milwaukee. We even got our interns to do other visits as well, the site assessments.

I think it was just something impactful for them to see, like, how valuable indeed is an inspector in a city and when you're looking at from the public safety and benefits for health. So we're gonna continue. Right now, we're just really, really preparing for the recovery workload, which is gonna be more about permits, inspections, and resources for affected population out there.

Did you all have a lot of overtime?

The first week, we have overtime. We are continue offering. I I same as commissioner Kruschke. I was like, over time, it's an option. The beauty about what we do too, it's like we've been really well organized. So in the fact of, like, creating shifts, we start from 6AM all the way to 5PM. Right? But there's been a good coverage at that point. But, again, I'm more about now evaluating what would be the workload for the inspection sites because that's probably also when the spike is gonna start happening.

Yeah. Any other questions? Thank you. Chair. Come in with tomorrow.

And maybe this has come up, but, you know, I keep thinking about those that have damaged furnaces that I mean, furnaces are sitting idle right now. Then once the temperature drops, especially elderly people that maybe got water in the basement and never bothered to look or couldn't get down there. Now it's cold and their furnace is not working. Have we thought about any kind of messaging encouraging people to have those furnaces tested?

Yes.

Okay. Yes. And, actually, we should we'll put in this note more because I think that is definitely something that we need to continue voicing more and more as we continue to come closer to those kind of chilly days. And the other part too, it's like, I mean, I think we have an amazing data right now. One of my next steps is gonna be doing letters, immediate letters directly to all the folks that have reported those kind of damages or not just for them to have that kind of, like, start preparing themselves in that side.

But I think that's a great point. We've been doing it, but probably we need more continue to do the message out there. So I appreciate that.

Just to add to that, honorable Smiling. I do he says that I it's hitting me how serious it is. I think it might be helpful if you guys drop, like, a couple of sentences or whatever with public relations and let others know because I we all have e notified Yes. And we can send it out, and some people might be working on their newsletters and that kind of thing that'll likely hit right before it gets real cold. So that might be helpful as well as we also have NSP organizers who are supposed to be working with neighborhood groups and all of that kind of thing that we should ask CDBG to make sure that they're spreading the messaging with the residents that they're working with.

And, also, members could share with the neighborhood groups that we all meet with, talk to, deal with on a regular basis as well. I think in a real grassroots kind of level, that message needs to get out there because it could really hurt people's health if they're you know, don't have a working furnace or have a improperly working furnace come wintertime. Okay. Are you done?

Yes. Thank you.

Order woman private.

Yes. I have a really specific question because it's

a call

I've gotten quite a couple few times about tenants who feel like who feel as if the place where they are living is inhabitable inhabitable, but the landlord is not willing to to make any moves. And a lot of this happened, of course, towards the end of the month because they already paid rent, they couldn't go anywhere. Now we're into September, so so I'm sure some people have moved on. But I've encountered quite a few tenants who live in places that did not have basements, which means the 1st Floor flooded. And they lost everything, but their landlords are not willing to do remediation.

They aren't although the tenant reported it, they, you know, they yeah. So I'm I'm just wondering, is there some sort of recourse for tenants in terms I know rent withholding is a thing, I don't know if if that's what they should be using. What what they could do?

I love where you're going. I I actually I think wasn't on Monday that I was saying as I was washing dishes over the weekend, I did realize that we do have rent beholding. Yes. Right? Which is like if you're not doing the repairs or code violations, DNS is empowered then to get that rent and do the repairs ourselves.

These are the calls that we really want to know more. We are definitely not being gracious at this moment with landlords. We really want them to do what they need to. I'm really mastering and trying to work in how to create a model of that rent abatement Uh-huh. And the rent we're holding that might be probably the other way kind of like I could pay first the the furnace installation or again, code violations, some things that are very, very needed at this point, and then the rent will come to us.

Mhmm. Mhmm. That that that but it's it's it's been in my mind. It's just like there might be some other ways that we can get there. Okay. Just wanted to really, really focus on the homeowners first. Yes. Understanding that definitely with the landlords, we are having also this those type of cases. Okay. So love to catch up after this in the addresses as well. I have no issues just to evaluate directly the cases. Thank you. Yes.

Okay. Honor honorable.

Thank you. As soon as people start as soon as the the we flip the switch on for for code compliance home loans or strong home loans or a modification of strong home loans, We'll figure out the funding source in finance next week. I see we're joined with all the cosponsor Alderman Chambers on that file. But will the city have capacity to process those code compliance loan requests? Are you ready for that? Do you need more resources or more help from other departments to do that?

Great question. Thank you so much for considering that part. Actually, we have a meeting on Monday with the team. We are gonna be merging two, three divisions or, like, assign staff from different divisions from the department that are really gonna be hands on deck just for the compliance load program perspective. So we do they have the capacity. The other option and the sister department, DCD, have also offered a backup if indeed we get like, know, a lot of like applications at the same time. But right now, we do have a task force within the department that will be just specifically a special project compliance program. Thank you.

Great. Any other questions for DNF? On messaging, I just would also add channel twenty five in the city's website as well. I would also say talk to DOA about office of wellness. They are the office of wellness, and they do have teams of people that are in the community. So Sure.

Thank you. Alright. Alderman Shineman?

Thank you, madam chair. At the appropriate time, I'd like to be added as a cosponsor to this file and

Oh, sure.

I'm looking at the the ordinance that was created in 2019. I hope I'm not doing any regurgitation for this, and I just wanted to know was this I guess this maybe is for the the emergency director, but will these follow was the the steps on the charter the director responsibility, would that follow in his plan?

What? Say it again.

Would they

follow, like, the the list that I have right here that's on here has to establish the the communication strategic plan with the strategic plan followed. Like, everybody could have just more of, like, hey. We're still we're we're still working out things. And, you know, I know chief Lipsky and the fire department was very instrumental, and commissioner Krusky was very instrumental in the the the early parts of it.

But Are y'all able to answer that,

or is that a We

can have another we can have a talk we can have a talk outside of this, but I I guess I'm just trying to

So hold on. Hold on. So I guess what I'm hearing from you, ardent chairman, was this based on past legislation that that. Do to and what you were Yes.

They offer.

Or Do you want us burger.

No. So I'd really like to see the document you're talking about before I I don't even know which version or but if

it's Let me take it back and let me ask this. To your knowledge, is there or was there a strategic plan already in place to deal with a flooding emergency?

So so what happened is is so my first contact was with the Office of Emergency Management. So that's how what triggered all of us to start discussing. Is there a plan on how to remediate? No. But is there a plan when a natural disaster occurs? Yes. So this is where the communication starts moving forward. Specifics of I don't have details on that, but I know my first call midnight was from Ryan, which actually coordinated all the other departments to start moving forward. And during the event, it's difficult. I mean, obviously, this is where MMD becomes the priority of saving lives in the event. Post becomes, obviously my department and everyone else. I mean but the initial communication did occur internally. I just don't know the specifics. I can't really speak

on And

again, we can have conversation offline. I just when I that was news to me when I first sat down and looked at it, and I just had to inquire on it.

Thanks for sharing with me. I I would tell you that a ton of effort has been done by emergency management director Ryan Zollicoffer to try to update the what's called a CEMP. I think the latest in force version might be from 2006 up until this occurred. I just want to say this all right so everybody at least just hears it from somebody. For a city the size of Milwaukee, with our complexities, our challenged populations, our dense populations, dense building sizes, and just the myriad emergencies that can occur here, to have an emergency management department with one individual assigned to it who does not have an emergency operation center to function out of is absolutely unheard of.

And so I guess what I'd say is if we wanna if there are complaints to be had about this, I would say throw him at us because he's one man. He's one person. And he's he's doing everything he can. I just wanna give some credit to Ryan Zolakoffer because he is he's overcast. He's one person. For a city our size,

it's Well, personally, I give credit to all of you because, you know, each of you have done, in my opinion, I can't speak for everyone else, a fantastic job on the response and the level of care on trying to ensure that the residents were taken care of. It's not easy by a long shot and have the person probably the most impacted probably with me, Autumn Pride, and Autumn Brigellis. I mean, we're all impacted, but different levels. You know, I I see the work that y'all done in my area and, you know, I just say kudos that the reason why I asked that question because I just wanna make sure in situations, you know, moving forward, what do we need to do to ensure that we are ready and can handle whatever comes at our way.

Yeah. So Madam chair.

We appreciate that.

And and what I'll what I'll say, I'll get you one second. I'll honor my breath. Because of the time that the conversation just took, I do wanna say this, and I I'll take it on the chin as the chair and and a cosponsor. We put this file together and thought about who should be here and who should be invited. Unfortunately, I think I'll take it as oversight on my part. An invitation was not I was just checking with the clerk's office. Was not given to the emergency management person. That's just the oversight. We were just thinking about departments. I would have hoped that he would come anyway, though, just because of the nature of it.

But but I but I'll take that on the chin for that if members are wondering why he's not here. I don't know why he's not here, but in all fairness, we didn't extend the same invitation that we extended to each of you to be here. Alderman Perez then alderman Alderman Taylor.

I just wanted to I appreciate your word, chief, about the capacity issue. And I guess with all the issues we've had, I think by now we would hopefully know that if if there is a capacity issue that needs to be expanded or an emergency department like you said to to be I mean, I I guess so. I guess we can't wait for emergencies to happen to either acknowledge that or to beef up the department if it's needed. We I think we've had a couple instances where we're wondering because it is a charter ordinance about establishing a city emergency communications plan, review and evaluate this thing, serve as a resource, coordinate. There's a lot of things that are in the the chartered.

If they're not being met and we need to expand on it, we we should be doing that and not I guess, it feels like we're always pivoting and not planning ahead. So that's that's why. Yeah. So if it's needed, I don't wanna wait for another emergency to figure that out.

We're, you know, we're we're not we're no strangers to these wide sweeping emergencies since the year 2000. It's kind of become the rhythm of things around here. So I would say, you know, he's and I really wish he was here right now, but he to his credit, he has been working on the communication plan specifically. So that is underway and it is partially implemented with the code red and the internal and external notifications. Is it flowing at max capacity and super smooth?

I can't speak to that because I I do think some of that would be subjective. But it is we are working the kinks out on that sort of stuff right now. And and directors all look offers I I have to credit him with that.

I I would offer this, president Perez. I'm one of only co sponsor with you and you two, alderman chambers, a communication file for the emergency director about where he's at in the deliberation of all of the things that are required within that statute or in that ordinance. So I think that we can have a fuller conversation beyond this particular emergency as to whether or not where he's at. And I would wanna do that sooner rather than later given that budget is coming up soon. So if there are some adjustments or priorities, we as a council need to consider that we know that before we Agree.

Finish the budget. So I look forward to working with you guys on that. Auditor, one more time.

Okay. Thank you. Well, first, since the conversation did take a turn, we'll stay right there where we are. And if you guys are gonna create a file that way, then I definitely would like to be a cosponsor on that as well. So while I was sitting here, I heard Ryan Zollicoffer's name several times.

And so, yes, as has been done, I was thinking that we definitely need to extend a thank you to him as well because it sounds like he was brains at the head of all this coordination. Also, being prime military myself, one of the things when someone says, are you ready? It's always you you say back, always ready. And so definitely, it appears that he has subscribed to that, and he wasn't just sitting there doing nothing but always thinking about how to respond because you don't come up with this kind of a plan and coordinate efforts at the last minute or with absolutely no thought. And so, again, kudos to him for that.

So thank you. If he is listening, if not, we'll just say thank you again. But everybody else will know that we're very grateful to him for his efforts in coordinating things. And and I'm just gonna take this time to to just say thank you to you too, health inspector because there was mentioned that you created that dashboard. And so that's always helpful too.

Sometimes technology technology is great, but sometimes we have to go back to the old way of doing things too, paper and pencil kind of era. Originally, too, before we get too far off, I wanted to also say thank

you

to Commissioner Jazmil because great, great job, very responsive, put a call into you and you were right there, and I appreciate that as well. Also, with the information that you provided and and had it ready all the time, I wanted to make sure I said thank you. But I also wanted to ask that you continue to have that information because it looks like we have a lot to do on the back end now. And just being able to provide that information, as I said to commissioner Krusky, the better you do your job, the better we do ours because we're getting those questions when you provide us with that information and we can provide that information, people aren't so, as you were saying, getting really worked up about things because if you have information available, they're very understanding. It's when we don't communicate Correct.

That causes the problem. So the more you communicate with us, the more we can communicate with them and things run smoothly. So again, thank you. I look forward to more of the communication so that we're able to share that out as needed.

Will do. Thank you.

Any other questions for DNS? All right, health department.

Thank you. Will only take about two hours to go through our Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's not working. I'll just wait. Thank you everyone. Moment of levity there. This last month has been really challenging for obviously director. Oh, Mike Todorace, I'm the commissioner of health for city of Milwaukee Health Department. As many have noted, you know, close to 75% of our department are city residents and we had staff that were dealing without having power for up to ten days after the event.

So this hits really close to home for everyone in our department. When the National Weather Service had issued the forecast that this weather system was gonna be pretty severe, what we have internally is called the crisis action team or CAT for short. And essentially, it's a small group that monitors potential emergencies. After the event happened on Sunday, we activated our incident command system or ICS to essentially start putting into place our plan. So our three priority areas are education, surveillance, and resource coordination.

During the event, we were really focusing on what was very clearly becoming an, you know, very large scale natural disaster. So our teams assisted the other departments in doing the damage assessments across the city. We were able to help coordinate the distribution of over 2,700 cleaning kits with Salvation Army. American Red Cross was also on the ground right away distributing cleaning kits, and they were using the same data from two one one to make those distributions. They found through their national responses that best practice is to go directly to people and and give.

So they were using the two one one data to guide where they went. I can tell you because they were charged with responding to all of Southeastern Wisconsin, the majority of their resources were actually allocated into the city of Milwaukee because of the density of people and the volume of two one one reports. We kudos to my epidemiologists and data team. We were able to turn on a surveillance report very quickly for enteric or and waterborne illnesses as well as injuries related to floodborne illnesses. So not only was that for the city of Milwaukee, it was also for Milwaukee County and providing surveillance for upticks in illnesses as well as injuries and communicating that with the hospital systems as well as the other health departments in the county.

Thankfully, I think folks really listened to the education that was being put out there and thank you to a lot of the alders who pushed that information. We actually had state representatives as well pushing that same information And when we were driving through the city, I remember seeing folks wearing boots and gloves as they're doing the clean outs and that brought me a lot of joy because I think that directly related to then we didn't see any upticks in waterborne or or enteric diseases. There's a lot of coordination with the state as well as MMSD. As commissioner Hasmel mentioned, we staffed and helped coordinate the multiagency resource centers. So these are opportunities one stop shops for residents who are affected to come and look for resources.

I can tell you from the data that's coming back from those, a lot of folks are looking for mechanicals assistance. So replacing furnaces and water heaters, echoing what we've been talking about. And again, huge shout out to our one of our data team members, Ryan Honick, who basically took all of these different data systems and put them together in a dashboard. And I can tell you that we're actually creating a public version as well so that staff or, you know, city other city staff who don't have access to it as well as residents can access it. It's a really robust system that's helped us to triage triage and essentially what the health department has done with resource coordination is to target volunteer groups to the most hard hit parts of the city and say, hey, these folks are the folks that need support with clean outs and debris removal.

There's still quite a large volume of folks that we're estimating need support. So it's around 3,700 folks that still need some sort of debris clean out. So we're really trying to think how we're gonna do that if this individual assistance doesn't get honored by, FEMA. So, commissioner Hazmalla and I run with, mayor's office this morning talking about some additional funding sources we might seek to help residents pursue different avenues to do the clean outs. And I just want wanna say again thank you to American Red Cross and Salvation Army.

They were really huge partners during this and we had a lot of other national groups like Team Rubicon that came into the city to assist with this. And and just we were talking about communication. We were in communication with director Higgins and CDGA and he had offered the same recommendation to Warren Cox about the working with the SP organizers to push information too. So I must extend my appreciation to director Higgins for making that connection as well. I think those are my main points.

And I also wanted to thank congresswoman Moore for coming into the city and and being a part of our resource distribution with Salvation Army. I really appreciate the our our federal reps advocating for this natural designation as well given how severe this event affected the city. Alright.

Any questions for the health department?

Madam chair. I know you talked about waterborne illnesses, I guess my question is around lung issues and breathing issues due to the mold that was around. I have asthma, my daughters have asthma. I know there are many people throughout the city who have it and with this mold that a lot of people have in their basements that they may not know how to remediate properly or things are even behind the wall. A lot of people think that you're cleaning it, you don't see it, that you're okay. So is there some guidance you're giving people around mold remediation and what they should do?

Yes, that's a great question. So it took a couple different forms, but right now if you go to our website, you'll see right on the landing page essentially different sections for kind of the types of questions you're looking for. So as an asthma sufferer as well, I can appreciate your cheers. I don't know if I'd say that but there's

a lot of really

good resources and there's really, I would say, inexpensive ways that you can do mold remediation. The biggest piece is to really identify the where the moisture has come through and address that. As commissioner Kraftski mentioned, there was that second round of storms that put in more water into our system. So if you're not able to seal a crack in your foundation or in your roof, then you're gonna continue to have that water intrusion and then you will continue to have mold issues regardless if you clean it.

So that those are

the big pieces of stressing them where the moisture intrusion is coming in. And then we've distributed and and continue to make available n 95. So if you are, say, going into a basement that you know has had some mold issues, can put that on and that can minimize the the chance that it's gonna aggravate your asthma or respiratory issues. We've been taking a handful of calls every day from residents looking for that same information. So if residents are having trouble navigating our website, they can just give us a call and we can help walk them through the steps for that.

There's also guidance both from the state and from us about how to hire if you need to mold contractor because you obviously don't want to be taken advantage of and you want to make sure that they're doing their due diligence. If you test for mold in your home, regardless if you had water intrusion, you're going find mold. It's just an inner environment. So I would just caution residents who have a contractor come out and say I'm gonna test for it and, you know, because they're gonna find it. It's like, you know, fishing with dynamite, you're gonna get something.

But, yeah, again, this it's a real simple bleach and water solution can help do that and then making sure that if you can get a dehumidifier open in your windows. Thankfully, we've been really lucky to have had a really long dry spell right now to help dry things out. But again, if you're looking for assistance with that, as we've mentioned, calling 211 and that has been kind of an entry point to help track what individuals might need and support getting court connected with a volunteer group that might do mold remediation. And as we've alluded to, there's continual planning going on and Encore which is another volunteer group that's here in the city right now is soliciting and I think secured some donations for mold inhibitors as well. So throughout the county we're actually looking through how to do distribution of that as well similar to the cleaning kits.

So if to repeat residents have questions they can come to our website to look for information and or just give us a call and we'll be happy to help.

Thank you. Mhmm.

Alright. Are there any other questions for the health department?

I'd like to offer one correction. Please don't fish with

dynamite. I

do wanna say thank you to DNS and thank you to health department and the team of folks who have been working on these flood issues for the last several weeks. It truly is appreciated by all the people we represent and by us as well. I think it's also a demonstration. Oftentimes, people talk about what's wrong in the city. I think what we've seen from both residents helping residents to all of the staff and departments doing going above and beyond is, you know, some of the good that is happening here in the city, and we we recognize that. Is there anything else anybody wants to say before we

just follow-up? Just have one one last comment. So I I don't know if you guys worked with I know you kind of worked with the community before. And so but we had a a church church in our district, the lamb of God, and they were working with making sure those cleaning kits got out too. So if he has worked with them, but I just wanted to make sure that I said thank you to them and kinda gave them a shout out because I think it's important, as alderwoman Cox just said, to make sure that we say thank you to those who have really been boots on the ground and put forth that effort to to assist others.

Mhmm. And if I could add, chairwoman Cox. Aaron Aaron Schapinski would be upset if I didn't mention the numbers because he crunched them very quickly for overtime and total cost.

So for

around just shy of 23,000 total cost, pretty nominal. Our overtime costs and comp time costs also very small. We're more on the response side and we were able to flex a lot of our time during the events and kind of redeploy staff, so we were able to absorb those costs pretty small. Or well, sorry.

And just to tap in, do get I I did have a number cruncher, so we're around 700,000 right now, plus minus.

So your department probably had the most wait. How about your guys? What?

Number crunchers in the room with me, so he's I don't think he's pulled it together. I'll get you the number. I I do I do just wanna add that we're just four of the departments here, but there were a ton of other people. Joan Johnson at the Milwaukee Public Library volunteered her buildings as a distribution point for civilian volunteers to show up and pick up cleaning supplies. I think of things like ITMD making some magical computer lifts out of nowhere, the GIS systems, the I know we're missing some departments, but I really, really appreciate the alders giving us space to work in the thick of things because I know everybody has questions and I just I really appreciate how the communications happened during this.

And I just I just want to make sure to show some love to the other city departments because everybody really pulled together here.

It was all around great effort from everyone. And, you know, we're we're proud to have your leadership in in things like this. You know, we always have moments where, you know, things can get testy and all the stuff, but I don't think this is one of those things. So I just wanna say thank you. Keep up the good work, and let's continue moving forward.

He brought up the library as far as I'm getting a message out. Their social media game is on a whole another level. So they're also a tool that we have to reach people. Alright. Well, thank you all. Thank you. And with that, I believe that's our last Yeah. Honorable and Tyler will move to hold to the call of the chair. I do think maybe we'll bring it back after we hear from FEMA and after we have after action numbers on everything. Alright. Thank you, guys.

Thank you.

Frighting updates.

Hearing no objections or order, it will be held. And having no further business, we are adjourned. Thank you.