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for County Work, City Living Paul Reinelt snaps with ideas, mainly about how the county can do jobs better. He crackles with ways of revitalizing the Downtown neighborhood where he works. He pops up to demonstrate what he's talking about.
That's one of his oversight assignments at the county's formidable fortress of a social services building at 12th and Vliet. The building once was the center of welfare services. It continues a post W-2 existence housing a conglomerate of services in a neighborhood crippled by blight, unkept promises and unkempt properties, all this blocks away from promising revitalization efforts in other portions of Milwaukee's Downtown. Unassuming in appearance, embarrassed by the fact that colleagues point to him as a neglected county treasure, Reinelt is also a nonstop exercise in snap-crackle-pop thinking. He holds a master's degree from UWM and spent the bulk of his long county career aiding parents and children in family social services. How he wound up as master shredder in one of the county's Operations hideaway -- well, that is complicated. But it's also an all-too typical story of what's been happening to highly trained, experienced workers as the county government has undergone significant cutbacks or just plain evaporation of human services. Suffice it to say that Reinelt sent in one of his crackling memos about how the county could improve operations, and bang! He was assigned to help do it. Which he has, even though he wasn't, figuratively speaking, given chewing gum and baling wire to handle it all. That hasn't slowed him. Literally, he has actually used dumped material, two-by-fours, his own car, penciled lists and inter-department activism to achieve on deadline and on the cheap an array of tasks for an array of county departments. Now he's pushing a way the county can do more for the neighborhood around the building by cooperating with the city and local groups and businesses. Reinelt envisions a bustling residential area for county employees, many of whom work within walking distance at the variety of facilities the county operates.
OK, let's back up a bit. Who is Paul Reinelt and why should the county listen to him? Reinelt, with some time off for further education in Canada and Mexico, has been a county employee since 1968. He's a member of AFSCME District Council 48's Milwaukee County Professional Social Services, Human Services & Related Employees, the Local 654 that has taken some savage hits in recent times on the family, foster care, adoption and related child care services it once provided. In most cases, takeover by the state, a turn to privatization and administrative screwups have reduced its members and limited the focus these employees once had on helping all manner of disadvantaged, disabled and low income families. Reinelt, whose parents emigrated from Germany, thinks his outlook about working for the county was strongly influenced by his heritage as the first generation of his family born in this country. "I was taught those old-fashioned ideas of public service," he said. "I came from a family that didn't buy that 'government is bad' argument. My father taught me to consider it an honor and privilege to work for the people." "There's a pride in what public workers do. Or should be. It's painful what has been happening. When child welfare was taken away, I could have cried. And the sense of accomplishment in our parks? What's happening to that when all of a sudden they want XYZ Lawn Service to handle things?" "You know, when I started, we had all sorts of services for the working poor and other families. We used to teach people how to live on low income, how to shop, how to bake. We were involved in their lives. And they were involved with us." In fact, for 25 years, Reinelt taught the parenting classes for the county. His wife, Sharon, now a librarian at a city school, also worked for the county. Their elder son, David, studies at MSOE. Their 17 year old, Joey, suffers from cerebral palsy, which has added to Reinelt's interest in programs that give full opportunity to the disabled. His interests are wide, so it's not surprising that this is reflected in his service and the ideas he's put in place at the county and in the community for more than three decades. Over the years, Reinelt set up many "Reading Is Fundamental" programs centered in area schools. He even landed a grant for a reading program for new mothers. He also landed a pioneer National Endowment for the Arts grant that put up art reproductions from various cultures - including Latino and Asian - in public buildings, about 60 pieces in all that you can still see on display. He doesn't even mind challenging his union when he sees a problem. That happened 21 years ago when Reinelt attacked contract language that allowed a leave of absence for a "woman" who gave birth to a baby. Reinelt argued, and won over co-workers and gained the change in collective bargaining, that the language should extend to either spouse. And then he said it should incorporate adoption circumstances. "It seemed kind of weird that at the time the large adoption service, which was the county, didn't offer a leave option to any county employee who wanted to adopt," he said, and he laughs. "Now today it seems incredible that this was an issue," since these rights have become standard in the industry. Some of his colleagues wonder if the administration's transfer of Reinelt to operations - when he clearly has so much experience in many other areas -- may have been an effort to get him to "put up or shut up" about what could be done more efficiently. If so, these administrators obviously didn't know Reinelt, nor his philosophy about the honor of public service. He put up. It's not a glamorous job, though it occupies a wide expanse of office space on the first floor of the Vliet building, conveniently right across from the mailroom. Mailings, sometimes in small batches, sometimes in large from departments throughout the county government, are part of his responsibility, nearly 150,000 pieces a year, often arriving at the last minute, often with essential deadlines. In addition, Reinelt is responsible for assembling many of the folders for handouts in county offices.
Similarly, Reinelt's office is the recipient of mounds of extra copies of the reports and paper work the county generates and then has to get rid of as departments outgrow filing space, close down services or switch offices. Reinelt regards it as almost a holy mission to make sure that any personal data on anyone is handled properly and shredded professionally beyond recognition, but he has also set up methods for recycling or reusing folders and other office and paper equipment that flow his way (part of that flow, he admits, is most easily handled by just jumping into his car and picking up boxes). These rescued office supplies look mint new and go back into county circulation. Thus, on any given day, you'll see piles of boxes and materials in various stages of work in Reinelt's areas - material to be recycled, material that has been, envelopes and labels and the stuff to stuff within them, all divided into separate areas for attack and processing. "In the past," recalled Reinelt, "we used to pull social workers off foster care or adoption to get the mailings out - so suddenly you were paying, what?, $22 an hour to stuff envelopes and affix labels." Reinelt, however, uses volunteers and those sentenced to community service, and for both groups he establishes a human touch and a sense of a better future. You can see it in the way he supervises them and interacts with them. "And we've never missed a deadline," he said. Last year, 92 community service persons were used by his department. "We keep a lot of people out of jail," he said, and he feels it's important to fulfill the court's terms meaningfully while also caring about the workers' future. And then there are the volunteers, people willing to help the county out, and some obviously there because Reinelt is. He also uses disabled people as often as he can, letting them build experience and credit that open the door to paid employment. "A number have gone on to paying jobs from here," he said. "I'm really happy about that." He met resistance using disabled volunteers, though. "I was told it was too costly to retrofit office equipment to use them in our work," he said. So he took and braced folding tables, found some lumber and presto - no-cost stations at the right height for wheelchair workers. "It goes back to how you view your employees, as an asset or a liability," he said, and the inescapable suggestion in that comment is that Reinelt is not just talking about his troops but about how many administrators treat the county's professional workforce. Call it Germanic frugality, call it commitment to recycling (people as well as products), call it proving what can be done with little budget, belief in people and daily planning - whatever your view, the way Reinelt runs his corner of the county universe has resulted in considerable service at minimal cost. It has even comes down to taking in the excess used telephones of the county and polishing them like new. And that small example is also a lesson in how Reinelt thinks. "We just have to look at the details of what we're doing," he said. "Did you know that when a phone doesn't work, it usually takes a technician just five minutes to fix that? But it takes a half hour or so get the gunk off and clean it all up," he said, pointing to a volunteer doing that. "We used to pay the technicians for the five minutes and then for the half hour, which was another waste of expensive hours."
Reinelt has been extending his thinking to the problems in how the building he works in could be more dynamically used to help rejuvenate the neighborhood. Because right around the building is a dismaying section of town -- until Reinelt takes you through it and envisions the possibilities. The county building at 1220 W. Vliet St. is well maintained, if you like locked side doors, single access entrance and dreary cream exterior. It's buttressed on the east by the freeway, no nice restaurant nearby for the workers, nothing really pleasant to visit outside when you take a walk for fresh air. Inside it features nice hallways and organized welcome and work areas. But peek around and you'll also see a lot of potential office space unrealized. There has been talk of remodeling and refurbishing it, though the current county problems have put that low on a long list. But it wouldn't take much , Reinelt thinks, and he points to areas of the city infused by the development of one large historic building, like the Schlitz complex, "buildings that were revitalized and became the basis for the entire neighborhood to improve, with shops and stores and new residential space." Then Reinelt takes you on a walking tour of the bad stuff surrounding this county building - vacant lots, most owned by the city, riddled with broken glass and freshly dumped tires and ale bottles. Then there are mercantile buildings, some with landmark potential, boarded up and painted over (some actually operating under those facades). There are houses that could sparkle but are sagging from neglect. Yet look south from this area and you'll see the major renovations around Marquette University. Look southeast and you can see the work centers of the county and city, such as the Courthouse and Safety Building. Walk west a block or so with Reinelt and you'll see the county's King Park, 21 acres with full recreational facilities and a community building, all underutilized, probably because of the sort of uncertainty citizens have about safety and family activities in the neighborhood. Yet only a block or two north is the Siefert elementary school and in these blocks nearer the parks some strong signs of newer residences, a church, a community struggling to come alive. But look back down Vliet St. from the park, two blocks east to the county building - and you would not know from the outside that hundreds work in that structure. Around it the street seems lifeless or forbidding, the stores look empty, the vacant lots trouble the eyes. Reinelt wants the county and city to get involved in this, using the service building at 12th and Vliet as a framework for attracting businesses and home-owners to this neglected area. "The obvious hope is that homes on vacant lots and improved homes where there is now blight would not just make this neighborhood safe and alive but add significantly the value of properties," said Reinelt. "The myth is that the vacant lots don't cost the city anything. They do. And not just in lost opportunity. The crews are out here clearing the properties of garbage and dumping, despite all the signs that people shouldn't. The vacant lots are an invitation to deterioration, beside just being a tragic waste." "And yet these locations hold a lot of promise and they are within sight of some of our largest public institutions."
Reinelt, in coordination with neighborhood groups and business associations, has been fashioning a "walk to work" home ownership program that the county could spearhead, envisioning that many who work in nearby county facilities would be attracted by special home loan programs and refurbishing help. There are already models of such efforts, including the nonprofit Select Milwaukee, working in such areas as the Miller Valley neighborhood, and creating ways for would-be homeowners to apply for a low-interest mortgage or a no-interest loan or other financial breaks, all this insured through private mortgage companies as well as federal mortgage purchasing and protection programs. For the Vliet project, Reinelt envisions improving existing homes as well as building on the vacant lots. There has been a lot of rethinking by urban planners that support this "walk to work" concept. In some cities, it has been private industry or even universities (Howard in Washington, D.C., Yale in New Haven, Conn.) that have bought and restored housing in distressed neighborhoods and given their employees financial incentives to move in. Elsewhere the concept employs no-cost starter loans and tax breaks for workers who join the project. There is also a turnaround on the traditional view of location, location, location in choosing a home. It was conventional in the past for families to look at spanking new suburban subdivisions as a way to get more for their money, given the costs of living in the city. Now a lot of the cost-saving opportunities are in the central cities of America, and a lot redevelopment and business efforts are looking there. Logically, a lot of people are suddenly thinking about "location efficiency." Suburban dwellers may not have seriously considered transportation costs in the past, but they loom larger with each passing day and each bump in gas prices and each roadblock to mass transit There are families that would love to find affordable housing close to where they work, rather than face hours of commuting. "It will take a real push and openness by the city and the county as well as the private sector to do this " in the Vliet area, said Reinelt. Political turmoil - whose county will it be anyway? - has put a lot of concepts on hold, and Reinelt is aware that job security may right now be the front thing on the minds of the county workers he hopes to help and attract. "But think of the idea! We redevelop this county welfare building, make it bustle with activity and services. We end all the vacant lots and also make it easy for our own employees to be part of the rebirth, which would also attract new business to the area," said Reinelt. "Isn't this just the sort of thing people would like to see their governments do?"
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© 2002 AFSCME District Council 48 Your e-mail feedback welcome!
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