Oconomowoc Mayor Likes The Interchange To Nowhere
Oconomowoc taxpayers should remember that they are on the hook for a $400,000 share if the state forges ahead with the I-94 interchange to a Pabst Farms mall in Western Waukesha County that doesn't exist.
And Waukesha County taxpayers are also obligated for a separate $1.75 million payment, though state taxpayers have to put up the biggest share, $21.1 million.
Not sounding so great for folks out that way, right?
And you wonder when the mall developer - - this is developer #2 who has down-scaled to a big-box, glorified strip mall the upscale mall project fantasized, then abandoned by mall developer #1 who has pulled out - - will ask either the state, the city, or the county to pay its $1.75 million contribution.
Let's get some truth in governing and call a boondoggle a boondoggle, and get busy repairing some local streets instead.
1 comment:
This is all part of an elaborate dance. Everyone involved knows that the PF development is going badly--very badly.
The regional shopping mall developers know that a group of upscale retail tenants will be impossible to find in the current recession/collapse. They'll be off the hook for failure by blaming it on lack of a Sawyer interchange.
The interchange will not go forward without a pretty rapid showing that upscale retail tenants are on-board and signed to leases before the first shovel of dirt is turned.
If Mayor Sullivan sounds the least bit like he sees the inevitable coming, he'll be blamed by the developers for killing the whole thing.
WISDOT is now claiming the same thing as Sullivan--that they need the interchange for all the other big-time development, regardless of whether the Pabst Farms fiasco flies or flops, particularly the Aurora Hospital.
My County Board representative, Fritz Ruf, says he's not voting any county money--despite the conditional commitment made by Dan Vrakas, County Executive--and that he doubts a majority of the County Board will get behind the plan. Vrakas cannot send the money on his own motion; he needs a vote of the Board to make it happen.
They are all waiting for some miracle of world-wide financial resuscitation to turn things around by October, a day of reckoning that is only ten months from now.
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