Mayor Barrett: Secure our neighborhoods, fix our streets, and enough with your damned streetcar | Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service
Ald. Bob Donovan
May 6, 2019
To our friends and neighbors throughout Milwaukee who will never know a moment’s benefit from the Milwaukee Streetcar, please know that we hear you and share your frustration with an administration that has chosen to ignore you.
We have heard you as you drove over streets left unmaintained and riddled with potholes even though the streets beneath Mayor Barrett’s Folly seem peculiarly well paved and plowed.
We have heard you as you wondered how a City with a budget of over a billion dollars could not find enough money to fund the repaving of even one alley in 2019 — not even one — but could conjure resources sufficient to lay track onto the very same streets from which trolleys were taken a generation ago.
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We have shared your ever-growing concern as our police department has been starved of resources, deprived of police officers, and prevented from stemming what we all know to be a growing problem of fear, crime, and disorder throughout the City.
We have seen, as you have seen, fire stations “browned out”, libraries close ever earlier, and street lamps go out for want of staff; all while “The Hop” clanks half-empty through the darkness.
And now the Mayor wants to expand a system that is not complete, that he cannot prove anyone rides, and that no one but him seems to want to pay for.
Not one expansion, not two, but three. What madness is this?
More to the point, what do any of us that care for the well-being of the City have left but our obligation to resist?
Knowing the certainty of opposition to this proposal, the Mayor is doing everything in his power to push this expansion through the Common Council as quickly as is possible.
You cannot let him.
Note we said you cannot let him. Our voices and our votes have been and will remain set against this absurdity. The other members of the Common Council — our colleagues — must know you agree with us.
Call them, write them, e-mail them (their phone and email information is listed below). If you have never contacted your council member before, do so now. If you have contacted him or her before, do it again.
This is where the Milwaukee Streetcar must stop. To be direct, only you can make that so. And we will stand with you.