We badly need to overhaul the composition of one particular regional planning agency in Wisconsin. The recent protests over inequities in policing have also told us we have subtle institutional inequities throughout our governments. The inequities cannot be starker than planning in southeast Wisconsin, where I have lived and worked for most of my life.
Usually, at this point in an opinion piece the author inserts a disclaimer. My relationship with the Southeast Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission, SEWRPC, in spite of my close professional connection to many of the topics they work on, has been essentially nonexistent. I have visited many MPOs around the country, sold software to and advised many more, but I have never so much as visited SEWRPC’s offices or attended one of their meetings. This has been SEWRPC’s choice.
I am making the bold assumption that regional planning is relevant. If regional planning is just a sham exercise done to maintain the flow of federal dollars, then no harm can be done by distortions to a fair planning process.
I once met a former mayor of Milwaukee at an art gallery while he was still mayor, and we began talking about regional planning. He described SEWRPC in derogatory terms so ugly I have never repeated them. Planners and engineers at other agencies in the state have expressed to me extreme frustration with SEWRPC, particularly in its treatment of issues in and around the City of Milwaukee.
Problems have persisted for decades because there is strong bias in how the planning board, “commission”, is composed. Commissioners are drawn from seven counties, each county getting exactly 3 seats on the Commission. Commissioners are appointed by the governor and a county executive (our term for the mayor of a county). The City of Milwaukee, with about 29% of the population of the region is guaranteed nothing.
So you may ask, how unrepresentative is SEWRPC? Representativeness can be measured in many ways, but I only need to cite a few statistics to show the severity of the problem. Milwaukee County has 46% of the people and gets exactly 1/7th of the Commission seats. Ozaukee County has 4% of people and also gets exactly 1/7th of the seats. Milwaukee County has 84% of the African-American population of the region, while Ozaukee County has 0.4% of the African-American population, each getting 1/7th of the seats.
SEWRPC can be considered unusual, even in Wisconsin. Madison and Green Bay, the second and third largest cities, have localized MPOs.
There is no definitive way to tell whether plans coming from SEWRPC are biased. An evaluation depends on a viewpoint. From my conversations with SEWRPC employees over the years, I believe they believe they are being fair and professional.
Federal law does not require MPOs to be broadly representative, even though representativeness is mentioned frequently in the FAST Act, but, really, shouldn’t extreme situations be addressed?
The “M” in MPO is “metropolitan”. The SEWRPC region, given its size, is heavily rural in character. The Milwaukee urbanized area contains 67% of the region’s population, but it occupies only 21% of the region’s land area. Occasionally there is chatter about decertifying SEWRPC as the MPO for the Milwaukee area. We must renew that conversation.
Someone would need to do a deep dive into SEWRPC’s recommendations to find anything suspicious. For example, many people think SEWRPC, over the years, has been overly fond of freeway expansion. Freeway expansions in regions of the US have had profound effects on migration out of central cities. And we know unfettered suburbanization has been associated with social, economic and environmental injustices. SEWRPC has demonstrated blindness toward freeway impact issues. For example, SEWRPC has resisted putting a land-use forecasting component into its suite of travel modelling tools. If you cannot see the problem, you cannot do anything about it. A true skeptic might call this lying by omission. Fortunately, SEWRPC’s freeway expansion plans have faced stiff political headwinds, resulting in shelving or delaying many proposals.
It is not particularly helpful having a “metropolitan” planning commission who is seriously out-of-sync with the desires of so many of its residents. While political action has countered SEWPC’s rashest ideas, the situation is far from ideal.
Alan Horowitz, Whitefish Bay, October 17, 2020