MILWAUKEE — County officials said they’re concerned that the Milwaukee County Transit System (MCTS) projected a $10.9 million operating deficit for 2025. 


What You Need To Know

  • County officials said they’re concerned that the Milwaukee County Transit System (MCTS) projected a $10.9 million operating deficit for 2025

  • The board said it has requested “detailed financial briefings” from MCTS so it can “identify the drivers behind the rapid shift in projections”

  • MCTS said the deficit is due to “unexpected expenses and lower passenger revenue”

  • On June 17, 2025, MCTS said it would reduce its services starting on Aug. 24, 2025 through the rest of the year due to a budget deficit

The Milwaukee County Board’s Committee on Transportation and Transit said it learned about the deficit through media reports, despite having a committee meeting on June 11. During that meeting, the board said it was not given any indication of “this impending deficit.”

The board said it has requested “detailed financial briefings” from MCTS so it can “identify the drivers behind the rapid shift in projections.”

MCTS said the deficit is due to “unexpected expenses and lower passenger revenue.”

The board said it has also called for an independent audit of MCTS, specifically its budgeting and reporting processes. Officials said this audit is currently being done by the county’s director of audits.

“We have since taken steps to better understand the circumstances that led to this troubling shift in MCTS’s fiscal outlook, which may result in reductions in service,” leaders of the committee said in a joint statement. “We look forward to the findings of the audit of MCTS to better plan for the future. Our riders and frontline teams depend on reliable service and fair labor practices. We must ensure that the people who keep buses running aren’t asked to bear the burden of a budget gap they didn’t create.” 

The board said it contacted Interim MCTS Managing Director Julie Esch in response to this information to discuss “cost pressures and service-level impacts.”

On June 17, 2025, MCTS said it would reduce its services starting on Aug. 24, 2025 through the rest of the year due to a budget deficit.

That includes a pullback of about 20,000 hours in service, but does not include cutting any routes completely, officials said. The reduction in hours will affect routes that are high-frequency with the lowest ridership in mid-day. MCTS said this will be on “non-peak weekday routes.”

MCTS said this will also affect route frequency levels on Saturdays.

“Reducing the frequency of buses is the last thing we want to do, but it will have the least impact on our riders. We provide 80,000 rides a day — that’s tens of thousands of Milwaukee County residents who depend on us to get to work, school and medical care,” Esch said in a release at the time.

A Five-Year Financial Forecast 2024-2028 report released by the Comptroller’s Office two years ago, in 2023, also predicted that at least 20% of MCTS bus services could be eliminated by 2025. It said increasing costs, lower revenue collected from fares amid falling ridership and tax levy funding that’s less than half what it was pre-2017, would be to blame.

MCTS said that despite having to reduce some service, it will still move forward with MOVE 2025 improvements, which include four new routes, in the fall.

Aly Prouty - Digital Media Producer

Aly Prouty is a digital producer for Spectrum News 1 Wisconsin, Ohio and Kentucky. An award-winning, multimedia journalist, she holds an honors B.A. in journalism from Marquette University and an M.A. in journalism and media studies from The University of Alabama.