GLENDALE, Wis. — Earlier this week, Gov. Tony Evers and the Wisconsin Dept. of Transportation (WisDOT) announced the latest recipients of funding from the Biden-Harris administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) that will provide more than $200 million for more than 150 local road and bridge projects across the state.
If your commute includes the stretch of Silver Spring Drive from 27th Street in Milwaukee to the Milwaukee River in Glendale, then you probably can tell the road hasn’t had many major repairs since the mid-1990s.
That’s about to change thanks to a lot of federal and state dollars, which local leaders want to spend carefully when it comes to construction.
“It pretty much qualified for the governor’s mantra of ‘Fix the damn roads,’" Glendale Mayor Bryan Kennedy explained. “We’ve got some ruts out here; a lot of semis have come along and just created damage over the years.”
With reckless driving on the rise, Kennedy and fellow local leaders didn’t want to rebuild the road the same way.
“Our real goal here is to reduce the reckless driving, to put impediments into the roadway that are going to bring down speeds, to create a segregated bike lane so that bikes can go up and down Silver Spring in a safe fashion, and also to expand our sidewalk access and to make sure that each of the bus stops now [are] much more accessible as the bus rapid transit line comes in," Kennedy said.
Reinventing the road is possible thanks to federal funds and state grants. The city worked with Rep. Gwen Moore to get the federal government to earmark $4 million for the project. An additional $3.9 million grant was provided by the state’s Surface Transportation Program (STP), which is funded by the Biden-Harris administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL).
Without those funds, Kennedy said the project would have had to be completed in smaller segments that could have taken nearly seven years to do.
“We were able to take a $12 million project and make it a $4 million project, split 30% to Milwaukee [and] 70% to Glendale,” Kennedy added. “Suddenly, it becomes something we can actually do in a year thanks to all the federal money that’s come in.”
For Gov. Tony Evers, who’s made fixing roads a focal point of his administration, the federal boost has helped Wisconsin fix more roads and bridges faster.
“Frankly, roads are expensive, and the state and federal government and local governments need to collaborate as much as possible,” Gov. Evers said.
The governor hopes to see collaboration not just on repairs, but rethinking safety too, as Glendale and Milwaukee have done.
“The really good thing about it, at this point in time, is there’s all sorts of data out there on how to make sure roads are safe, and it’s great to see that people are using that new data to make the decisions around what the roads are going to be,” Gov. Evers explained.
According to the Evers administration, it has improved more than 7,400 miles of roads and 1,780 bridges since 2019, including more than 900 miles of roads and 200 bridges last year alone.