MILWAUKEE, Wis. – According to the North American Vexillological Association, there are five core tenants that should be considered when designing a flag: keep it simple, use meaningful symbolism, use two to three basic colors, no lettering or seals, and to be distinctive or be related.
Per a Milwaukee city ordinance, these will be the guidelines that the Milwaukee City Task Force will use as a road map for helping to decide submissions for the city’s next official flag, a matter which has perplexed city leaders for years.
Per the lettering of the ordinance drafted by 11th District Alderman Peter Burgelis, the task force “is responsible for collecting, reviewing, and evaluating public submissions” for a new city flag. The Common Council will then make the final selection from those finalists.
Much of the discussion Monday was administrative in nature, with the task force focusing on establishing the process that will go into their decision on the finalists later this year.
“Our task is to make this process as accessible as possible to the residents of the City of Milwaukee” said chair of the task force Venice Williams.
Williams said the preferred timeline would include a “vigorous month of public engagement” in September, with the goal of having finalists selected around early October. That leaves the body with about six weeks to put together a public engagement rollout plan.
“I’m not concerned about the timeline at all,” Williams told WTMJ Monday. “I think that people who are passionate about their own ideas for this flag will come forth.”
Milwaukee author and historian John Gurda, who is also on the flag task force, says there is a sense of purpose to make sure the body gets the job done right rather than get it done quickly. He added during the meeting the public engagement period needs to be robust to avoid Milwaukee becoming a city of multiple flags, official or unofficial.
“There’s danger in redundancy that would lead to disunity, so I hope that doesn’t happen,” Gurda told WTMJ.
The latest chapter in the city flag saga comes after a prior effort by Alderman Burgelis to officially adopt the “Sunrise Over The Lake” design, better known as the “People’s Flag”, failed with the Common Council in 2024. The task force did acknowledge Monday that the People’s Flag design could, and likely would, be put forth as a design again.
While there have been other flag redesign contests held in Milwaukee (including one in 1975 and another in 2001, neither of which yielded a result approved by the city), much of the modern discourse surrounding the city flag dates back to 2004. At the time, a poll conducted by the North American Vexillological Association, rated the flag of Milwaukee as the fourth worst of all major cities in the United States.
Then in 2015, a TED Talk Youtube video hosted by radio producer Roman Mars dissected the science of vexillology, or the study of the history, symbolism and usage of flags. In the video, Mars took particular umbrage with the City of Milwaukee flag, which he described as “one of the biggest train wrecks in vexillological history” (the Milwaukee flag discourse starts at the 10:53 mark of the video):
After “The People’s Flag” was voted on in 2016, it would take until 2018 before the Common Council officially voted 6-2 to revisit the proposal later in the year. Then in 2019, the body started an entirely new process to decide upon a new flag for the city, after the Milwaukee Arts Board determined the previous November that the process which led to the selection of “The People’s Flag” was not inclusive enough.
That inclusivity issue was also a key sticking point for several Common Council members during the 2024 flag talks.
The 2025 task force expects to meet again August 7th.
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