Waukesha Faces A Reckoning: Have We Spent $2.7 Million On Infrastructure For Problems That Don't Exist?

WAUKESHA — I spent Saturday afternoon at my kitchen table with three years of the city's capital improvement ledgers, a legal pad, and a calculator with a tape printout, because somebody was going to add these numbers up before Tuesday's Common Council budget work session and it may as well have been someone who used to sign off on the invoices. The total I arrived at, checked twice, is $2.7 million spent across three projects that were each, at the time they were approved, solving a problem nobody had gotten around to establishing.

I want to be careful here, because I am not against infrastructure. I spent 34 years building it. What I am against is infrastructure that shows up before the problem does, which is what I believe happened three separate times in this city in the last three years, and which is going to happen a fourth time if somebody doesn't ask a very simple question out loud before the next contract gets signed: who exactly asked for this?

The Roundabout, $1.2 Million

The East Avenue roundabout opened in February, was built to "ease traffic flow" at an intersection that, by the city's own 2023 traffic study, backed up during two rush hours a day and was otherwise fine, and has since passed its 165th day without a single city-confirmed case of a driver completing all four exits without hesitation or a course correction. The city has floated a symbolic key to the city for the first driver to navigate it cleanly on the first attempt. As of this week, nobody has claimed it, and the offer has been on the table since March.

I am not saying the intersection needed nothing. I am saying a four-way stop costs about $4,000 in signage and paint, and a roundabout costs $1.2 million, and somewhere between those two numbers there should have been a document that said, in plain language, why the difference was worth it. I asked the city engineer's office for that document. I was told the roundabout was recommended in a 2022 corridor study. I read the 2022 corridor study. It recommends a roundabout. It does not explain what was wrong with the intersection that a four-way stop wouldn't have fixed.

The Bridge Study, $400,000

On August 31, the Common Council approved $400,000, 80 percent of it a federal planning grant, to study whether it is feasible to build a pedestrian and multi-use trail bridge across the Bypass near Fox River Parkway. The study won't conclude until early 2028, at which point, if the bridge is found feasible, the city will apply for a separate construction grant, subject to its own review, for a bridge whose feasibility will by then be a year and a half old news.

Here is my objection, and it isn't the federal share of the money, which I understand residents did not personally write a check for. My objection is that a feasibility study answers whether a bridge can be built. It does not answer whether anyone on either side of the Bypass wants to walk across it. Those are different questions, and the city is spending $400,000 to answer the one nobody asked and $0 to answer the one that actually matters.

"We've started building infrastructure in search of a problem, instead of the other way around. That's backwards, and it's expensive to be backwards."

— Bob Krueger, retired Waukesha DPW supervisor

The Traffic-Calming Streets, $1.1 Million

The third item is a $1.1 million traffic-calming initiative on residential streets near the hospital corridor, curb bump-outs, raised crosswalks, a handful of speed tables, approved after residents complained about speeding. The city's own after-action memo, which I obtained through an open records request and which took eleven days longer than it should have to arrive, states that "the problem was mostly speeding by hospital staff," not through-traffic and not residents on those blocks. My neighbor Ned England, who has clocked speeders on Backslide Way with a radar gun from a lawn chair for going on three years now, could have told the city that for free. He has told the city that for free, repeatedly, at public comment.

Instead the city spent $1.1 million recontouring streets that residents were not the ones speeding on, to solve a problem that a retiree with a $60 radar gun had already diagnosed correctly and at no cost to the taxpayer. I called Ned to check my numbers against his logs. He read me eleven months of hospital-shift-change speed readings over the phone. It took forty minutes. He was not surprised by any of it.

What I Asked The Council To Do

I raised all of this with Councilman Gary Puchalski ahead of Tuesday's session. He told me the city is "committed to responsible stewardship of infrastructure dollars" and that each project "went through the appropriate review process." I don't doubt the process was followed. I doubt the process asks the right question. A review process can approve a roundabout, a bridge study, and a set of speed tables in full compliance with itself and still never once require anyone to write down, in a sentence a resident could read, what problem existed before the money was spent.

What I'm asking the council to adopt, starting with whatever comes up for a vote next, is one page. Before a capital project gets a line item, someone puts the problem in writing, in plain English, with a number attached to how many residents are affected and how anyone knows that. Not a corridor study. Not a memo referencing a prior memo. One page, signed, public. You taper at the work. You don't taper at the idea of the work, and you don't build the exit before you've established that anyone's driving toward it.