Tuesday, October 6, 2026
Trail advocacy requires government partners to say yes, and I’d like to examine how 31 years of trust-building between Metro Mountain Bikers (Metro) and Milwaukee County Parks (MCP) transformed a skeptical bureaucracy into an active partner.
The first meeting Marty Weigel had with an MCP executive director went something like this: Marty explained that Metro wanted to build trails on county land, and the executive director explained how that would work: Metro would identify the locations, raise all the money, and MCP would send staff to build them. Weigel remembers walking away with a clear read on the situation: This isn’t going to work.
There were no professional trail-building contractors at the time. No established design standards for what a mountain bike trail should look like. The arrangement wasn’t going to produce anything, and Weigel knew it immediately. MCP was operating the way departments do when something new shows up at the door: carefully, at a distance, and with no urgency to say yes. Metro was asking for something the department had never given anyone, and there was no established way to evaluate whether this group was worth the risk.
Metro then spent the next three decades answering that question.
Trail advocacy has an obvious goal: to get trails built. The requirements underlying that goal are less obvious – land, technical knowledge, and volunteers willing to show up for unglamorous work, year after year. But before any dirt moves, someone inside a government office has to say yes. Getting to yes, when an organization has no formal standing and an unproven track record, is a much different project than building a trail.
The formal turning point came when a new executive director took one look at the situation and told Weigel the county was going to do something about its lack of mountain bike trails. That produced the Kegel Alpha trail system in Franklin, WI – Metro’s first. But a new executive director’s enthusiasm only opens a door. Keeping it open requires something more commonplace and consistent.
“I think trust is earned both ways,” says Jim Tarantino, MCPs’ deputy director. “It just takes time, and in some cases, some demonstrated success that we can trust these people – this group – because we gave them a project, and they did it successfully.”
What Metro did with that opening was show up and do the work, month after month – trail workdays, maintenance commitments, training sessions for county staff and other volunteers. Jacob Sanchez, the department’s current trails coordinator, met Marty Weigel early in his own career at MCP, when he was still working seasonal hours under a predecessor. His first impression has held: “Really enthusiastic and want to get things done,” he says. “That impression has not changed.”
But enthusiasm alone doesn’t transform a relationship. What Sanchez noticed about Metro went further than enthusiasm. “People that are involved with this really take this seriously, and they really understand the trail design standards and what it takes to make a trail happen.”
That knowledge carried weight. MCP can’t build a real partnership with an organization that doesn’t understand how bureaucracy operates – the environmental reviews, the community processes, the county board dynamics, all the places a project can stall or die. What Metro figured out over time was that the system had rules, some written and some not, and that working within those rules was how a volunteer organization eventually gets something real to work with.
Tarantino is candid about organizations that don’t figure that out. “We say no, and then they do it anyway. It happens pretty frequently.” He’s matter-of-fact about the outcome. “It usually takes about a dozen rogue offenses before we really start to question the relationship.” The contrast with Metro he leaves unspoken. When something was unclear or a volunteer pushed against a boundary, Metro handled it internally and flagged it to MCP. Thirty-two years of that kind of discipline is the foundation underneath everything that’s been built.
Guy Smith was hired as MCP’s first trails coordinator in 2004. The first two people he met in that role were Weigel and a fellow longtime Metro advocate named Harold Schmidt. They took him mountain biking. That’s how Metro had always operated: get people on the trails and let the experience make the argument. Smith rose through the department over two decades, eventually becoming its current executive director.
Over those two decades, Smith watched Metro demonstrate something that turned out to have consequences well beyond trails: volunteer labor, handled well, could be structural to how a parks department operates rather than occasional or supplemental. Invasive plant removal, litter cleanups, trail maintenance, tree planting. “Volunteerism is like a core of what we do,” Smith says. Today, MCP coordinates over 66 volunteer friends’ groups across the system. That model didn’t come out of the blue.
The formal document at the center of this is a memorandum of understanding (MOU), the agreement that allows a volunteer organization to do maintenance and trail work on public land. Metro’s MOU with MCP is now one of the oldest standing in the system. Negotiating it took years. Keeping it in good standing took the same discipline that produced it: showing up, following through, and not treating the relationship as settled just because a document existed.
Sanchez describes what this looks like day to day. His schedule is stretched across a system that spans urban, suburban, and rural land, and Metro understands that. What he values is a partner who is patient with the pace of government work but doesn’t let things drift off the agenda. “Consistent communication and really just keeping me honest is a huge thing,” he says. Metro and MCP run bi-weekly check-ins. Sanchez calls that structure “one of the strongest things we have.” A small thing, but it keeps the relationship moving rather than sitting.
The stakes of organized, consistent advocacy are clearer in the negative than the positive. Tarantino describes what happened about a decade ago on the west bank of the Milwaukee River, where a small group of neighborhood residents opposed allowing mountain biking on the existing hiking trails. “There were no more than five,” he says. “But those five people showing up at meetings of the county board were enough to win the day and have mountain biking prohibited in that area.”
He tells it the way someone who has spent much of his career inside local government tells things: plainly, as a helpful lesson about how the process works. “A neighborhood meeting may have ten people at it. If two, three, four of those ten people are vocal about a cause, well, that’s a pretty significant portion of the public that’s shown up.” The people who stay home don’t get counted. The people who assume the right outcome will happen without them don’t get counted either.
Metro learned versions of this lesson the hard way, through projects slowed by a handful of vocal opponents. What they did with those lessons was build a broader coalition. Letters of support from the Wisconsin Interscholastic Cycling League, the Bicycle Federation of Wisconsin, neighborhood groups, daycare operators, and local foundations. Different voices, same direction. “If lots of voices are saying one thing,” Sanchez says, “that’s really powerful.”
Tarantino puts the underlying principle this way: “You do need an organized support network to promote any new trail development, any new mountain bike usage, or any changing of use in the park system.”
For the first time in nearly two decades, MCP is updating its trails network plan, a document that will shape where trails get built, in which communities, and what kinds of trails they will be. Marty Weigel was in the room for the first one. Metro now has a seat at the table for this one too, contributing to the decisions rather than commenting on them afterward.
Tarantino is direct about why. “We want engagement with advocacy groups and stakeholder groups and the general public as we develop these plans. That’s where ideas come from.”
Metro Mountain Bikers is 32 years old. The bi-weekly check-in with Jacob Sanchez has been on the calendar for years, and both sides keep showing up.
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here