Whistleblower Greg Gryskiewicz, as promised, has documented MMSD’s and Veolia’s gross mismanagement as he personally experienced it during his 14-year career working in various roles to maintain and operate MMSD’s wastewater treatment plants in a 37-page document:

No doubt that MMSD’s poor customers are wondering what’s happening to the hundreds of millions of tax dollars being sent to MMSD and Veolia. Disappearing work orders, taxpayers having to pay to replace expensive machinery and equipment not being properly maintained, understaffing at the plants, mismanagement destroying the physical infrastructure of the plants, lack of equipment redundancy, increased energy costs due to plant mismanagement, and the heavy reliance on contract workers to perform work that Veolia workers may have been able to perform at less cost.

Here is his full report: Gryskiewicz Report 05 18 2026.

Gryskiewicz initially went public with his allegations at a Common Ground (CG) press conference May 13th, exposing extensive mismanagement of the regional sewage system by the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District (MMSD) and Veolia, the private multinational, for-profit company hired by MMSD, resulting in millions of gallons of raw sewage being unnecessarily dumped into Lake Michigan and backuped into people’s basements during rain storms.

Common Ground, a powerful, non-partisan alliance of 45 member institutions across greater Milwaukee—including congregations, schools, non-profits, small businesses and neighborhood groups, has undertaken an investigation of the performance of Veolia’s management of the MMSD wastewater facilities over the last 18 years. CG has listened to 26 current and former MMSD and Veolia employees detail their experiences of mismanagement. On April 30th CG first went public with concerns and testimony from whistleblower Steve Jacquart, a former MMSD Intergovernmental Relations Director for 19 years; that inspired Gryskiewicz to also come forward.

CG is currently in the process of asking the Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau (LAB) to conduct an audit of MMSD and Veolia. LAB last audited MMSD in 2002. It is critically important that Veolia’s management practices be evaluated before the Commissioners vote on a new 10-year, $700 million contract for the management of the MMSD facilities.

In his newly released document, Mr. Gryskiewicz goes into much greater detail and offers many more examples of widespread, gross mismanagement at the plants: dangerous working conditions, “asset destruction,” fraud/deception, understaffing, inexperienced/unqualified workers, a “toxic” work culture, shocking incompetence, wasting millions of taxpayer dollars, and needless polluting of our Lake and basements. Here are excerpts highlighting the areas of greatest concern:

1) Workers’ health and safety may be at risk due to the failure to maintain the facilities. The document details numerous threats to workers, who may be suffering physical, mental, and occupational illnesses from the workplace environments at Jones Island (JI) and South Shore (SS) plants.

“Exposure to hazardous atmospheres in the occupied control room in preliminary treatment at JI [Jones Island] has been ongoing for over a decade… A plant wide 3rd party environmental health testing needs to be done. When I was employed at Jones island people were complaining about the air quality of the control rooms, in the buildings, etc. Veolia . . . did some sort of air quality monitoring in the milorganite facilities, and then refused to release the findings.”

“Control rooms have been left in an abandoned state (no functional a/c or heat with temps in excess of 90 degrees) with operators still occupying them. Exposure to hazardous atmospheres in the occupied control room in preliminary treatment at JI has been ongoing for over a decade. The secondary treatment facility building has had numerous pipe breaks, and a significant amount of the ceiling fell to the floor due to water damage. The same building did not have functioning heat in winter for numerous years, leading to broken pipes.”

“damaged asbestos tiles”

“unsafe atmosphere (Hydrogen sulfide gas)”

“infested with mice”

“after the roof was put on the lights didn’t work for over a year, which kept a significant part of the plant (over ⅓ of it) dark at night outside of buildings. This was brought up in countless meetings, safety standdowns, etc and nothing was done for over a year. “

“milorganite all over them [floors] making slip hazards”

2) “Asset destruction through a lack of maintenance . . . This asset destruction hit an unbelievable height when the bar screens (that filter debris from the waste water) in preliminary treatment at JI [Jones Island] started literally exploding. They have a large “rake” that cleans a massive screen that collects debris, and those rakes were literally blowing through the top of the equipment.”

“a severe state of disrepair”

“Universally equipment across the board is either at a reduced capacity, or not working.”

“Veolia would actively steal parts from other equipment to make something work. This left a trail of non-working equipment and no spare parts. “

“For a while equipment wasn’t getting oil changes/lubrication at all.”

“The milorganite facility has been and likely is still held together with ”mighty putty”, or epoxy putty that comes in a tube. . . . nothing would ever be done to fix the big leaks. 8 hours of using might putty would only last for a week or two before it wore out, and new leaks started. . . . use cookie pans, caulk, and duct tape to lessen leaks. Very rarely were machinists allowed to weld in patches to actually fix the worn out equipment, it was run until failure . . . “

“Veolia stopped 100% of all maintenance on the system, so there was no grit removal for over a year. During rain events the grit would plug up all of the primary clarifier pumps, destroy the primary sludge screens, and cause debris buildups in the digesters . . . MMSD found out they weren’t maintaining it, and ordered veolia to do something . . . . told him just because something was a capital project isn’t a reason to stop fixing something. . . . that weekend two steam fitters were brought in and in less than 8 hours they got the whole system working with all the pumps pumping.”

“Using the crane to remove material from the tunnel is a requirement of veolia, because the debris can wind up in the deep tunnel pumps which causes excessive wear and vibrations of the pumps, along with overloading/damaging prelims bar screens. Well for significant amounts of time veolia refused to clam.”

“the motor caught fire . . . . A machinist and I investigated and figured out the bearings were never greased . . . the motor was destroyed and a replacement was around something like 40K. . . . “

“just pushed the problems down the road instead of fixing them, . . . led to inability to control the discharge levels of pollutants.”

“catastrophic pump failures, plugs in the line, excessive line pressures, leaks, and total line outages were common”

3) Deception

“From an outside standpoint things might have looked like everything was ok because broken/reduced service pieces of equipment might have not been labeled as out of service or appeared to be available on the computer control system. However when needed they couldn’t be relied on.”

“Work orders disappeared, were deleted, and some were rejected without valid reasons. Numerous occasions I would keep putting a work order in for equipment that I really needed and nobody would look at it. On numerous occasions I would go to a department head (by phone or in person) and tell them to stop screwing around and get it fixed only to have the work order deleted.”

“that number was fictitiously high, because it never correlated with what they actually had available.”

“show 50-90mgd going through south shore max, despite the capacity being listed at 300mgd. . . . deceitful “

4) Understaffing, vacancies and inexperienced/unqualified workers

“A considerable problem that was faced during the entirety of my time at Veolia was constant vacancies and understaffing. . . . they had eliminated countless jobs. . . . they chose to understaff everything.”

“I have witnessed unqualified managers (people who have never operated any position in the power house) running turbine engines in the power house, whole facilities (South shore) left with nobody running it at night for multiple days a week, and Shift supervisors (who are the authority in charge at night) disappear and not be able to be contacted.”

“The turn over rate with the shift supervisor position is worse than a taco bell and that is literally the person who is in charge of both facilities during the night and on weekends.”

“Many unqualified people (defined as no experience in waste water, no management experience, no prior plant MMSD plant experience) would show up in high level positions making operation decisions that would negatively affect the facility.”

“the contractors often didn’t know what they were doing”

“More than once I was requested to operate equipment I wasn’t qualified to run because nobody was available to do it.” ”

5) Unethical or Illegal

“I have been told to do things that amount to permit violations (such as retesting residual chlorine for final effluent . . .) when the initial test did not pass.”

“One day a contractor is doing a “capital project” that supposedly MMSD is paying for and the next day the same contractor/workers are working on a “veolia” project. I genuinely worry that MMSD (aka tax payers) are actually paying for the contractors work for Veolia despite already paying for it in the maintenance contract. . . . something didn’t seem right.”

“when they violated the permit I 100% believe if at any point the final chlorine test had passed, management would have instructed me to record a pass for the day, despite knowingly being in violation for over 12+ hours. . . . the plant could knowingly be in violation for hours but still have a clean bill of health. The legality of this needs to be looked into”

“MMSDs signing off on things being done but they weren’t functional.”

“veolia managers told workers to not mention anything to MMSD workers about the motor. MMSD didn’t know it existed, and Veolia was going to send MMSD a bill for the motor. Well MMSD workers found out and put a stop to it immediately.”

6) Culture of Fear and Stress

“I didnt come forward sooner because I believe[d] that nobody would have listened to me. MMSD didnt care about what plant workers thought.”

“there is no easy way to contact MMSD to report it. In the past a union president (and workers) went to an open to the public MMSD meeting and tried to tell MMSD that there are problems and bring light to those and MMSD has done nothing.”

“ I (and people I worked with) raised concerns over the plant health and were laughed at.”

“Its scary when you as an operator are trying to prevent a permit violation and the head of the facility didn’t even realize the last two weeks have been a quarter inch of rain from a DNR permit violation.”

“employee morale was abysmal”

“often working 20 to 30+ days straight of 12 hour shifts and regardless of wanting to do it, it would cause burnout.”

“ If you did not take overtime they would not consider you for management positions.”

“personally threatened multiple times”

“toxic”

“‘fill it out correctly or there will be consequences.’ The problem is when that boss was asked who was making mistakes and what the mistakes were, he didn’t know and was clueless. Pressed further he was asked to show operators how to fill out the paperwork and in front of everyone he literally couldn’t do it properly.”

“the highest Plant manager at JI was told by a Veolia corporate boss to ‘Stand in the corner while the adults talk’ . . . . The level of disrespect was astounding”

7) Incompetence Wasting Millions of Tax Dollars

“both MMSD and Veolia management have been extremely ignorant and unqualified”

“millions of tax dollars have been wasted and millions of dollars in equipment has been wrecked”

“Sub par equipment, poor install craftsmanship, unqualified contractors working on equipment they don’t have experience with, etc, was commonplace.”

“example of one situation (of many similar) where a major screwup happened that could have been prevented”

“I have witnessed brand new equipment that collectively must have cost millions (with labor to install) literally breaking itself apart before they even made it a week.”

“increased energy costs due to plant mismanagement”

8) “MMSD . . .did not hold Veolia accountable.”

“Since nobody from MMSD ever spent time with the operators to determine what’s really broken and what’s not, they relied solely on Veolia’s word and the work order system to determine what’s going on.”

“MMSD would often have “contract compliance” people on site that followed the work of contractors to “verify” things were done correctly. Many of these people had no idea what they are looking at, and would sign off on things being completed properly.”

“For all practical purposes MMSD let veolia do whatever they wanted and no matter how bad things got with failed equipment”

“unethical, wrong, and wasteful”

Veolia “either outright lied or didn’t have an accurate idea on anything”.

“Communication from Veolia Operations and maintenance supervisors was very bad . . . many times pieces of equipment would be fixed and sit for weeks or months because nobody knew it was fixed.”

“MMSD has failed to set any standard as to what’s acceptable. Universally they have made it known that “permit” or “contract” violations are not acceptable, yet there is nothing said about going into rain events with half your equipment broken and plant operators are literally praying they don’t flood the prelim building into the streets.”

“The south shore treatment plant . . . It is unacceptable that the plant has not been operated consistently at full designed capacity for over a decade, this must stop.…Enough with the excuses, fix it.”

8) Polluting Lake Michigan

“South Shore waste water plant historically has not been operated anywhere near the capacity it was designed for. . . . This reduced capacity also lead to . . . : 1) Combined sewer overflows lasted a longer time then the[y] would have with the plant being able to take capacity, 2) it caused a long “detention time” of the waste in the sewer system that fed south shore, which led to the waste turning septic due to time without oxygen, and 3) I am certain it led to Combined sewer overflows/diversions that wouldn’t have been done otherwise.”

“what could have been done in a day or two with the south shore running at capacity became 4 to 5 days straight of bypassing the tunnel contents into the lake.”

“Both Veolia and MMSD have been disingenuous in how they care about lake Michigan/rivers/ the sewer system. Their decades of “shennagians” towards plant equipment has lead pollution of the lake that shouldn’t have happened “

10) THE REAL TRUTH is “the story of how close they were countless times to plant disasters, blowing contract/permits, or how much money has been wasted”

“MMSD and Veolia like to bring up their status with permit violations and contract compliance as some form of proof everything is fine. The problem with this is it has nothing to do with the maintenance of the facilities.. It is absolutely true, they have met permits 99% of the time. This doesn’t tell the story of how close they were countless times to plant disasters, blowing contract/permits, or how much money has been wasted in the tug-of-war on who’s going to pay for broken equipment. It doesn’t say they have been efficient (in both time and money) at fixing equipment. It doesn’t mean they treat people well. Yes technically they are in compliance with almost all previous Combined sewer overflows/diversions, however that doesn’t mean those diversions could have been significantly smaller (or not happened) if south shore was running at capacity. “