Pabst Farm Shopping Mall Interchange Project Fee Of Just 7% Looking Even Sweeter

Developers will bear the full cost of road improvements tied to the expansion of I-94 in Kenosha County, according to the Daily Reporter.

The Wisconsin Department of Transportation, WisDOT, has certain formulas that it applies to private interests that will benefit from a publicly-funded road project, and I am told that it's a relatively inexact science if and when shares get apportioned.

Transportation funding and road spending are getting squeezed by a variety of factors:

* Overblown and unnecessary spending, particularly the $1.9 billion committed to the I-94 reconstruction and widening between Milwaukee and the Illinois state line;

* Falling gas tax revenues for transportation budgets as driving and fuel consumption declines;

* Soaring prices for oil-based road-building materials, like asphalt, not to mention diesel fuel that powers the trucks, road-graders and other vehicles that deliver materials and otherwise help put projects into the ground.

So legislators will look at a variety of means in Wisconsin and Washington to get more money into the system, since none of our political leaders have the will to reduce road-building to reasonable, sustainable levels.

That means higher gas taxes, boosted vehicle registration fees, first-time tolls in Wisconsin, property tax, income tax and bonding increases, and other methods to squeeze more money out of taxpayers and motorists to keep the highway/political complex fully fueled and oiled.

Which brings me back to the deal cut earlier this year to build a $25 million interchange in Western Waukesha County at Pabst Farms to serve an upscale shopping mall that has had an on-again/off-again planning history.

Plans come and go, but the interchange has been approved.

The assessment to the mall developers for this privately-owned mall?

$1.75 million, or 7%.

The other shares - - $1.75 million to Waukesha County, $400,000 to the City of Oconomowoc (now there's a bargain, too), and $21.1 million to state taxpayers.

That would be you and yours truly.

The state could have assessed the mall owners a larger percentage, but didn't.

Why not?

Because with a full diamond interchange already built, the rest of the so-called freeway reconstruction plan across Southeastern Wisconsin will thus have one interchange already done years early, making the remainder of the Waukesha County segment west of Milwaukee a fait accompli for WisDOT.