Flooding prompts changes to leaf pickup, street sweeping in Milwaukee

• 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.