Fourteen Common Ground leaders attended today’s meeting of the County Supervisors Committee on Intergovernmental Relations and delivered this statement:
Thank you to all of the County Supervisors who signed on to the resolution calling for an audit of the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District and its contractor, Veolia Water. Your leadership and willingness to publicly call for an audit helped push the MMSD Commissioners to initiate an audit process earlier this week.
We are hopeful that the audit will truly be independent, comprehensive and public. And we are pleased to hear that you do as well. We also support having a county supervisor on the audit advisory committee to make sure that the interests of the public are represented.
Additionally, we have called on the MMSD Commissioners and its Ad Hoc Review Committee to pause the contract process until the audit has been completed and released publicly. Our position is that the 10-year, $700 million contract to operate and maintain our wastewater facilities should not be awarded before the audit is done. We appreciate hearing support for that from some of the Supervisors present today.
Thank you for taking seriously the concerns that have been raised by Common Ground and 20 whistleblowers. After 8 months of investigation, last night we released our own report, detailing the concerns of 20 former and current Veolia and MMSD employees. Seven of these employees have publicly identified themselves. All report serious mismanagement, causing the wastewater treatment plants to never run at full capacity, leading to the unnecessary dumping of millions of gallons of untreated sewage into our Lake and our basements. Furthermore, nine of them assert that there is a culture of falsifying records.
Thank you again for helping to protect our lake, our tax dollars, and our public health.
