Waiting For A Tree Is A Lot Like Working For The City, Says Retired DPW Supervisor

WAUKESHA — In September 2023, the city was promised a seedling grown from the "Survivor Tree," the callery pear that lived through the collapse of the World Trade Center and has since been propagated and shipped out to communities across the country as a living memorial. Grede Park was selected as its home. As of this week, the seedling has not been planted. It has, to my understanding, not yet arrived. I spent 34 years with the Department of Public Works, the last eleven as a supervisor, and I want to say plainly that this does not surprise me even slightly. If anything, three years feels ahead of schedule.

I got a call Tuesday from a reporter, unnamed here at her request, asking whether I found it odd that a single sapling could take longer to reach Grede Park than it took to build the park's actual picnic shelter, which went up in fourteen months including a permitting delay caused by a dispute over the shelter's roofline. I told her I didn't find it odd. I found it familiar, which is a different and in some ways worse feeling.

What A Tree And A Culvert Have In Common

Waiting for a tree is exactly like every other city project. First you pick a location. Then you wait. Then you pick a different location. Then you wait more. Eventually, someone passes away. And then the tree shows up and it doesn't fit. I don't say that to be cynical. I say it because I watched it happen, in that exact order, with a culvert replacement on Northview Road that took four and a half years and outlived both the alderman who proposed it and the contractor's original bid.

The seedling's file, which I have not personally seen but which a friend still inside Parks and Forestry described to me over coffee at the Sunset Drive Culver's, has apparently moved through no fewer than three proposed sites within Grede Park alone: first near the pavilion, then near the sledding hill on the theory that a memorial tree needs sightlines, then back near the pavilion after someone pointed out that a young tree and a sledding hill are not compatible neighbors. My friend says the file currently lists the location as "TBD, see prior TBD."

"Waiting for a tree is exactly like every other city project. First you pick a location. Then you wait. Then you pick a different location. Then you wait more. Eventually, someone passes away. And then the tree shows up and it doesn't fit."

— Bob Krueger, retired Waukesha DPW supervisor

The Nursery Question

Part of the delay, as I understand it, is entirely reasonable and not the city's doing at all. The 9/11 Memorial's seedling program grows its saplings at a partner nursery for several years before they're mature enough to survive transplant, and demand from municipalities and school districts nationwide means requests get queued. I don't fault anyone for that part. What I fault is what happens on our end once the tree is finally cleared for shipment, which based on prior Waukesha memorial plantings I'd estimate at an additional eight to eleven months of site walkthroughs, a soil test that gets scheduled twice and cancelled once, and a plaque design that goes through committee.

I raised this with Councilman Gary Puchalski, who I've called on infrastructure matters since roughly the start of his own political career in 2019. Puchalski confirmed the city remains "fully committed" to the planting and said residents should expect updates "as the timeline firms up," a sentence I have heard in some form about the East Avenue roundabout, the Northview culvert, and, if I recall correctly, my own retirement send-off luncheon, which was rescheduled twice before finally happening in a conference room instead of the park it was originally supposed to be in.

Quarterly Meetings Through 2027

My suggestion, offered to Puchalski and now to anyone at the city willing to take a call from a retired DPW supervisor with strong opinions and no remaining authority, is that Waukesha stop treating the seedling like an emergency and start treating it like what it actually is, which is a long-term civic relationship. Stay optimistic. Keep the receipt. Hold a quarterly check-in meeting on the matter through 2027, not because anything will be resolved at any individual meeting, but because a standing quarterly meeting is the single most reliable way I know to make a city government feel like progress is happening whether or not it is.

I'll be at the first one, assuming it's scheduled, which itself is not something I'd bet on. In the meantime, I'd encourage anyone walking through Grede Park to look near the pavilion, or possibly the sledding hill, or possibly neither, and picture a small tree there. It's coming. I spent 34 years learning that "it's coming" is not a lie the city tells you. It's closer to a weather forecast: broadly accurate, wrong about the timing, and not worth rescheduling your life around.