Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Financial Questions Swirl Around UWM/County Grounds Deal

The Journal Sentinel editorially expresses its strong belief in the UWM plan to buy land for an engineering school and related purposes on the County Grounds in Wauwatosa - - despite UWM's recent request to delay the proposed $13+ million land purchase agreement until July.


I am hearing there may be hangups with the availability of tax credits to purchase some historic buildings on the site - - a piece of the deal that propels it forward and infuses vital dollars into the overall plan.

[In fact, federal grant assistance for historic preservation is in trouble nationally, says the Daily Reporter.]

Real estate deals with the best of intentions come and go all the time. Projects downtown and in the Park East corridor are proposed, studied, then dropped because of financial shortfalls. Others are successful in their first iteration.

The UWM plan has additional complications - - environmental and transit access - - just to mention a few.

Maybe some answers will be forthcoming at upcoming meetings involving Wauwatosa officials.

We'll see.


1 comment:

enoughalready said...

I still hope this UWM location serves as a spur to promote a transit link betweeen UWM's eastside location, Marquette U., and UWM's Wauwatosa location. People who like to do work on trains, including academics, and those academics who do not drive would be well-served by such a link, I think. And so would students attending both institutions. The development of joint study programs in some areas could even be facilitated by such a link, such as happened in Boston with Boston University's many ties to other area schools, facilitated by their T.