Politics & Government

Talking South Side Issues With Pat Jursik

County supervisor discusses the future of the Hoan Bridge, an I-794 extension, and more.

In a wide-ranging interview, Milwaukee County Supervisor Pat Jursik talked with Oak Creek Patch earlier this week about a host of southern Milwaukee County issues.

We detailed the problematic public transit situation . The following is a condensed version of Jursik's thoughts on other issues.

On what's next for the Hoan Bridge:

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I created the Coalition to Save the Hoan, and the Hoan Bridge is going to be re-decked starting in 2013. We won that part of the battle. The next issue is (accessibility) for pedestrians and bicycles.

The city of Milwaukee is requesting one lane on the northbound side of the bridge be dedicated to bikes and pedestrians. That would leave two full lanes and a shoulder for vehicles. The southbound part of the bridge would continue to be three lanes. Their theory is that the traffic that comes out of the downtown area requires more load capacity than the traffic going in. I don’t know if that’s true - if one side of the bridge gets more traffic than the other - but Milwaukee’s position is to put a bike path on the northbound side.

Find out what's happening in Oak Creekwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

I’m a huge bicycling fan. I do the , I love the bike trails, my main exercise is bicycling almost daily - about five miles or so on the Oak Leaf Trail. I’m not sure I buy into losing a lane. Why not consider a cantilevered bridge, for just a pedestrian-bicycle path, that would hang off the Hoan arch? (Jursik talks about her idea in greater length in this editorial in the Bay View Compass

When Chicago improved their lakefront, they did Millennium Park. That was their key project. We are now looking at long-range lakefront planning. Our 'Millennium' project could be that bike/pedestrian path that hung on the Hoan. If you did it properly, with beautiful lighting, architecturally interesting ... you could have a very fantastic thing. A tourist destination. It would just be an exciting thing to do.

On :

I chair the 794 Expansion Committee. We’ve had good meetings. We're getting (the planning) of the last stretch now into Oak Creek finished. Oak Creek and its city officials are looking at where they might want ramps. That’s the kind of stuff we’re looking at right now.

We have a meeting about every three months, and a lot of engineering is being done by SEWRPC (Southeast Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission). They study what would have to be done, and some sensitive areas in terms of the environment and wetlands.

There’s a very clean footprint - we don’t have to remove businesses, we don’t have to remove homes. We're finding that for the most part, the public has been pretty supportive of what we’re doing. By 2012 we're going to schedule public hearings throughout the area so that the public can come in and look at drawings, the vision for on- and off-ramps.

We will have to get state funding. The Walker administration is very supportive of highway development ... it's politically feasible right now.

794 is going to be your local corridor. There is no good north-south route that gets you up and down the lakeshore, which has created a lot of bottlenecks on local roads. We have an opportunity to really create the vision for the local corridor. The I-94 system should carry the interstate traffic. This (794) would be for local traffic.

One of reasons why I’m running for re-election (next April) - I could easily go home and be retired - I want to get the 794 piece done. I want to make sure Hoan Bridge gets re-decked. These are very important projects I started and that I want to see finished.

On the state of the Milwaukee County Board:

The board has never been able to get past the pension scandal. I wasn’t there at the time, but every person who’s a county supervisor gets that mud thrown at them. Any talk about money, we have to discuss that and put it aside. The public has such little regard for county superviors, and maybe rightfully so because it was a terrible scandal. It follows us no matter what we do.

The politics of the county board are very, very tough. We will have 18 supervisors after redistricting – it's hard to get consensus to do anything. You really have to work hard to do things.

I’ve been around the block a few times and I don’t get too excited when people aren’t happy about my vote. I can't please everybody.

On Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele:

We’ve stopped fighting with the county executive. The second floor (of the downtown courthouse building, where the Board of Supervisors' offices are) and third floor (where the county executive's office is) used to do nothing but battle. That’s changed. He’s trying to make the board part of what he’s planning. The jury is still out on county exec – he's got to put a budget together. We’ll see. 


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