A divided Common Council voted Jan. 27 to spend $14,000 on a new "design element" for the city, a measure that proponents said would help Wauwatosa modernize its branding for the digital age at a time when it is preparing to launch a revamped website.
The measure, to hire the company McDaniels Marketing for the design work, passed by an 8-5 vote over the objections of several council members who said the expense wasn't justified and ran counter to a growing focus on belt-tightening in city finances.
Joseph Makhlouf, a council member representing District 3 who regularly questions city expenses, called the design contract "a rabbit hole we shouldn't have gone down," and he renewed his opposition to the contract before the vote.
Amanda Fuerst of District 7 agreed that the "timing is off" for even a relatively small expense like this — small compared to the city's annual budget of $81 million — because taxpayers have been calling for relief from rising property tax bills.
But others argued just as strongly that marketing services, though perhaps not as essential as services like garbage pickup and public safety, are still an integral part of the city's wide array of services and should not be neglected. The emblem that currently serves as Wauwatosa's default logo is a shield image created by a 9-year-old Tosa resident decades ago, and it does not scale easily in digital formats.
"Part of our jobs as alders is to improve the city services," Sean Lowe of District 5 said, and optimizing how the Wauwatosa presents itself to the world is a city service. "When people are looking at Wauwatosa and searching for the City of Wauwatosa, you do want to be in the 21st [century]."
Brad Foley of District 2 made a similar case for approving the additional design and branding work as part of the website redesign.
"It is part of the way we present ourselves. You look at the City of Brookfield's website, you look at other municipality websites in the metro area, and our website is sorely lacking. It is the way that people explore what the city's about," Foley said. "These are one of the choices to make in order to update on how this city presents itself to the world."
The website redesign this year was already in the city's budget for 2026, and city staff have said the final cost estimate for that project came in under budget, meaning that the $14,000 for a new design element would not require a budgetary increase.
Development of the Wauwatosa shield design was an even lower-cost option in 1957: It was the work of 9-year-old Suzanne Vallier, whose design won a city-wide contest that year.
In her design, the shield’s four quadrants featured a Native American arrowhead, a mill taken from the city’s early history as Hart’s Mill, a home symbolizing Tosa as the “city of homes” and a cross signifying a “city of churches.” Decades later, in 1992, the cross was removed under pressure from proponents of the separation of church and state.
Even today, the shield can be found everywhere in Wauwatosa, from the letterhead on city meeting agendas and the lower right corner of the city’s website to the city’s signature blue street signs from 124th Street to 60th Street.
To develop a new design element, five contractors submitted proposals, and the staff recommended McDaniels Marketing, a firm that has worked extensively on municipal and corporate branding projects across the Midwest. (The McDaniels proposal can be viewed here.)
City officials have emphasized that the existing Tosa shield will not be eliminated, though a new design may take on new prominence in digital messaging. "It's really an effort to come up with a complementary, flexible element," Communications Manager Eva Ennamorato said at a Jan. 20 committee meeting in explaining the request.
That committee voted 3-3, sending the measure to the full council without a recommendation.
At the full council, the votes in favor were Foley, Lowe, Margaret Arney, David Lewis, Rob Gustafson, Aletha Champine, Joe Phillips and Melissa Dolan. Voting no were Makhlouf, Fuerst, James Moldenhauer, Mike Morgan and Jason Wilke.
- David Paulsen, a Tosa East Towne resident and editor of Tosa Forward News, has more than 25 years of experience as a professional journalist. He can be reached at editor@tosanews.com.
