Park vandalism, frustration rises
By Matt Hrodey
It’s been a long comedown for the Milwaukee County Parks Department. In 1980, perhaps the system’s heyday, when the construction projects of the 1960s and 1970s were still new, the county enjoyed 1,327 full-time parks employees. Today, the number has shrunk to about 220, and some say having fewer employees in the parks is driving up vandalism.
the milwaukee county audit department says this window was damaged by vandals inside tiefenthaler park
County Supervisor Gerry Broderick, chair of the parks committee, says vandalism “is a direct result of not having workers in parks to intervene in those types of situations.” There have been some particularly grisly ones this spring – torched playground equipment at Wilson Park, smashed windows on county maintenance vehicles at Grant Park and profane graffiti on the Humboldt Park band shell.
“It’s frustrating. You try to maintain a park system for the public, and a few bad apples come in and don’t respect it,” says Parks Director Sue Black. She said she couldn’t draw correlation between declining park staff and vandalism but estimated the damage has “steadily increased a little bit from year to year.”
The county enjoys one of the largest parks systems in the country. It boasts about 64 acres for every 1,000 residents. In a survey by the National Recreation and Park Association, using statistics from 2008, the most recent such study available, the median was 12 park acres for every 1,000 people (in cities or counties with populations greater than 250,000).
Although Milwaukee has five to six times more park acreage than most counties, it only has about half as many employees per population than the national median in 2008. The capacity of Milwaukee County’s parks workforce is also reduced by its need to take 22 furlough days this year.
The options
Parks Committee members plan to discuss today what Broderick and Supervisor Chris Larson describe as a recent spike in park vandalism. Black says she’ll be reporting on recent incidents. The committee will discuss the county’s option for curbing vandalism, according to Larson. “The options are pretty limited,” he says.
Black insists the solution lies in youth programs that promote stewardship of the park system and in the roughly 60 community groups that help maintain, watch over and raise money for the parks. Jody Johnson, co-chair of the Grant Park Watch, says the group’s members keep their eyes peeled during the day and their ears open at night.
Johnson lives across from the South Milwaukee park where vandals recently slashed golf cart tires and smashed the windows of county trucks parked inside a lit, fenced-in storage area. Before joining the Watch, she says, “I just thought it was just this blissful, idyllic little park over there.”
But she’s seen vandalism to make her think otherwise. In 2008, the group offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of whoever cut down six large trees on the park’s golf course. Johnson says the vandal used an ax, not a chainsaw, and left the felled trees on the course to rot. “This was in-your-face vandalism,” she says.
Last summer, the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Department’s Targeted Enforcement Unit increased patrols in Grant Park, she says. But when winter came, the officers were reassigned.
Ruth Simos, president of the Humboldt Park Watch, says the park system’s staffing cuts have hit afternoon and evening shifts hard, reducing shifts when employees are most likely to report or at least deter vandalism. She sometimes feels like the park is a “sitting duck” for vandalism.
The park’s band shell, home to the Chill on the Hill concert series, gets hit frequently with profane graffiti. Larson says he bought paint one week and recruited friends to help cover up the spray paint before a concert because a county painter couldn’t get to the job in time. He and Simos wonder if the vandalism is timed to interfere with the concerts.
But perhaps the worst vandalism so far this year hit Wilson Park a couple weeks ago. An arsonist torched playground equipment, leaving it a total loss.
The damage only adds to the park system’s long list of deferred maintenance, which supervisors say is approaching $300 million. According to a county audit of the park system released in December, the cost of maintaining the system has outstripped its resources.
The result is what the county audit department called “a tale of two systems,” a mix of eyesores like the Grant Park golf course clubhouse, another target of vandalism, and jewels like the Boerner Botanical Gardens.
The county’s great wealth of 156 parks is beginning to look like a burden. “We don’t have enough resources to patrol all of them,” Broderick says.
(note: a previous version of the story incorrectly calculated the ratio of parks employees to population)