• Milwaukee is introducing new flood prevention measures after experiencing historic rainfall.
• The city will require residents to bag leaves for pickup instead of raking them into the street.
• A set monthly street sweeping schedule will be implemented on streets that allow parking on both sides.
• The new leaf policy will start in the fall, but the street sweeping changes could take up to three years to fully implement.

After a month of historic rainfall in Milwaukee, the city’s Department of Public Works is introducing two measures aimed at assisting in flood prevention.

The city will transition to bagged leaf pickup in the fall and will implement a set monthly street sweeping schedule on the city’s “exception streets” that allow parking on both sides.

The new leaf bagging policy changes Milwaukee’s current leaf collection policy of asking residents to rake leaves into the street for pick-up.

Leaders from the Department of Public Works discussed the measures and fielded questions from council members at the city’s Public Works Committee meeting April 29. Many of the questions were related to concerns over flooding across the city, and what more could be done to stop it.

Several council members voiced frustrations shared by residents in their districts who have repeatedly experienced flooding that impacts their homes and workplaces.

“When we add up all of this pain and suffering, there is a major impact to the city of Milwaukee,” said Ald. Marina Dimitrijevic, who represents the 14th Distrtict.

Milwaukee City Engineer Kevin Muhs said city leaders are still working out logistics for the changing protocols for leaf pick-up and street sweeping, but wanted to give residents a heads-up that the new measures will be coming.

The new leaf pick-up will start in the fall, while the change in street sweeping schedule will likely take at least a year to fully implement – and potentially as long as three years – as it will require paying for and installing new signage across 25% of the city, Department of Public Works Commissioner Jerrel Kruschke said.

The street sweeping change will be a gradual roll-out, impacting some streets before others, Department of Public Works spokesperson Tiffany Shepherd said. Vehicles that illegally park during the monthly street sweeping on the “exception streets” will be ticketed and towed.

The announcement of the new measures come after a record-breaking April rainfall for Milwaukee. From April 1-28, Milwaukee logged 9.39 inches of rain surpassing its April record – from NOAA data available since 2000 – of 7.38 inches, set in 2013.

April storms caused about 2.7 billion gallons of sewer water to flow into local waterways and Lake Michigan – a part of Milwaukee’s Deep Tunnel system that prevents backups in resident basements, Kruschke said.

The changes to leaf pick-up and street sweeping aim to reduce a contributing factor to flooding, since leaf debris can clog sewer drains and catch basins.

Kruschke said that during 2025-26 leaf pick-up, the city collected 13,569 tons of leaves – about 1,500 tons more than the previous year. However, he said, DPW crews were not able to access leaves in many areas of the city where vehicles are permitted to park on both sides of the street.

He pushed back against the notion that the city isn’t doing enough for leaf clean-up and other types of flood prevention.

“Our staff has been working around the clock, 12-hour days, pretty much nonstop, basically since October,” Kruschke said.

“Mother Nature has not been our friend in April, period,” he said.

In addition to rolling out changes to leaf pick-up and street sweeping, the Department of Public Works is partnering with the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District on projects throughout the Milwaukee area, and continues to seek opportunities to improve stormwater management, Muhs said.

“We’ve not just been sitting around. … Obviously, the Deep Tunnel is the most siginificant initial investment in managing water drain routes in the city’s history, but that type of work is continuing to happen,” Muhs said.

Milwaukee’s intense rain leads to 2.7 billion gallons of sewage released

Kevin Shafer, MMSD executive director, said among those projects is the construction of a 30-million gallon stormwater basin at North 35th Street and West Capitol Drive that, along with two other basins completed in 2018, will slowly drain water from major storms into Lincoln Creek. Another project underway, in partnership with Milwaukee County, is carving a basin in Jackson Park to store floodwater before it moves into the Kinnickinnic River.

Each project costs $40 million to $50 million, Shaker said. MMSD began accelerating them after the city’s August 2025 record-breaking rainfall.

“We’re going to need them six, seven years from now,” he said.

Still, Shafer acknowledged that Milwaukee’s recent severe rainfall totals from April 2026 and August 2025 are more than the city’s infrastructure has been able to handle.

“We’ve got great partnershps throughout the communities, but 15 inches of rain, 7 inches of rain – there’s no system in the country that can handle that much rainfall,” he said.

Contact Kelli Arseneau at (920) 213-3721 or karseneau@gannett.com. Follow her on X at @ArseneauKelli.

Eight-time Grammy winner Kacey Musgraves will return to the metro Sept. 22 to headline Target Center in downtown Minneapolis.

Tickets go on sale at 10 a.m. May 8 through Axs. American Express card holders have access to a presale starting at 10 a.m. May 5.

A Texas native, Musgraves spent years trying to establish herself, self-releasing several albums and competing on the long-forgotten “Nashville Star” in 2007. In 2012, she finally landed a deal with Mercury Nashville and hit the road with Lady Antebellum. Her 2013 major-label debut, “Same Trailer Different Park,” earned rave reviews and adoring fans thanks to Musgraves’ likable singles, including her breakthrough “Follow Your Arrow,” the rare country hit about tolerance.

Her second album, 2015’s “Pageant Material,” covered similar territory, but Musgraves took a bold move toward pop music with 2018’s widely acclaimed “Golden Hour.” It went on to win all four of its nominated categories at the Grammy Awards, including album of the year and best country album.

In 2021, Musgraves released “Star-Crossed,” which examined her painful divorce from fellow country singer Ruston Kelly. She opened her first arena tour at the former Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul the following year. “I Remember Everything,” her 2023 duet with Zach Bryan, entered the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 1, making it the first country duet to do so since “Islands in the Stream” by Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers.

On Friday, Musgraves will issue “Middle of Nowhere,” an album that finds her “leaning intentionally into open space and traditional western elements, and as always, earnestly examining the human experience.”

It features collaborations with Willie Nelson, Miranda Lambert, Billy Strings and Gregory Alan Isakov. She has invited three Texas mariachi brothers who were recently detained and released by ICE to open for her this weekend at a series of shows in her home state.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. (WISH) — Purdue University has received a $20 million commitment from the Ricks Family Foundation to establish the Purdue Institute for Healthcare Systems Innovation at the Indianapolis campus.

The institute in the Mitch Daniels School of Business aims to improve health care efficiency and effectiveness, the university said in a news release issued Wednesday afternoon.

Dr. Christina Ricks and her husband, David A. Ricks, the chair and CEO of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Co., are the primary leaders of the foundation.

James “Jim” Bullard, a dean for the Daniels School of Business, said in the release, “Considering the health care situation in the U.S. today, there is a clear need for rigorous, market-informed research that challenges conventional thinking and drives new solutions. This institute will allow Purdue to lead that work and make a lasting difference.”

As Purdue works to develop its relatively new Indianapolis campus, the university recently announced that plans for a 12-story apartment building on recently acquired canal property in Indianapolis are now on hold as the university develops its campus, Mirror Indy reported.

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