MARSHFIELD – City leaders in Marshfield have begun to drill down on their list of options for the Weinbrenner building.
Following a 30-minute discussion, members of the Common Council agreed March 10 to allow staff to pursue what City Administrator Steve Barg called a “dual track approach.”
“1) Work with J. Jeffers & Co. on an initial draft proposal to redevelop the Weinbrenner building, focused primarily on the affordable housing model,” Barg wrote in a March 11 email to Hub City Times. “This would be brought to the Mayor/Council for review and discussion; and, 2) Investigate and provide a report to the council regarding an estimated cost and timeline for razing and clearing the existing structure.”
Demolition and redevelopment were among the options Barg presented to the council at its Feb. 24 meeting.
Those options also included marketing the property publicly and securing professional consultant services for further direction.
Earlier in the meeting, Joe Dunne from Milwaukee-based J. Jeffers & Co. told city leaders his firm is still very interested in pursuing a housing project in the facility, located at 305 W. Third Street.
“We remain excited about the opportunity to redevelop the Weinbrenner building,” Dunne said. “Historic rehabs are kind of right in our wheelhouse.
“Tax-credit development is very active in the state right now and we’re seeing a lot of interest from investors,” Dunne added. “Hard to know where interest rates are going to be. We’ve had some pretty good luck right now with construction costs holding steady, but what that outlook looks like for the future I don’t know.
“There’s a bill that was introduced in the Wisconsin State Legislature to increase the allocation of the state’s four-percent tax credit, which is one of the tools we were looking at using when we last put together a model for the Weinbrenner [building],” Dunne continued. “In that bill, they’re also looking to increase the targeting for rural districts and Marshfield qualifies as rural under the USDA guidelines, so that has always been a benefit for a LIHTC (Low-Income Housing Tax Credit) application that would kind of move us ahead in the queue on competitive scoring.
“We’re exciting by the opportunity,” Dunne concluded. “We want to work with the city staff and the city council to put together a project that meets what you all are looking for, and if that’s a portion of the housing reserved for seniors, that’s something that certainly we can do with tax credit developments. If it’s family housing, we can have a mix in there. What we really need to do next is reengage with Steve [Barg] and the team of city staff that we were working with and figure out what the right steps are to redevelop the property.”
“J. Jeffers & Co. has significant expertise in historic preservation and adaptive reuse and we are confident that the Weinbrenner building can be repurposed in a manner that is respectful to its history while establishing a new useful life for the foreseeable future,” the company’s original proposal reads. “Preserving and highlighting the historic elements of the building are important goals of our plan, as the successful redevelopment of the Weinbrenner building will help to define the character of the West Second Street District.”
“I’ve always been in favor of the Jeffers plan that we got,” said Alder Brian Varsho. “But the more and more I sit here and think about it, I would not be opposed to tear it down either. So, I’d be in favor of listening to Jeffers and going through that again, but I am not completely sold that we don’t just tear it down either.”
“The overwhelming feedback I’ve heard has been to tear it down,” said Alder Derek Wehrman. “I don’t know that I think that’s the right answer, but I don’t think housing fits what our intention was for that space. I still think it needs more time. I don’t want to sit on this forever, but this may require a committee if we’re going to continue to discuss this.”
Alder Mike O’Reilly, who in earlier discussions brought up the idea of tearing down everything but the main three-story structure, wondered what it would cost the city to do that, and what the process looks like for removing the property from the State and National Registers of Historic Places.
“Living in the construction world for the last thirty-five years, I can tell you that redoing a historical building is a monumental task,” O’Reilly said. “I can say that, if we’re looking at affordable housing of some nature, you’re going to be able to build it cheaper than you can remodel that building. There is absolutely no doubt about it.”
Alder Rebecca Spiros asked what the city is willing to spend, no matter which direction the council takes.
“And I don’t know, in all the conversations that we’ve had, that we’ve ever picked a number that everybody’s comfortable with,” said Spiros. “And we’ve never really had a clear direction on what it would cost to tear it down, what it would cost to fix it, what it would cost to maintain it while we were waiting to have somebody bid on it and redevelop it, and I think it’s really important that this council decide a bottom number.”
“I remember when they decided they were going to tear down the old city hall on Second Street, guess what happened? The town went just nuts,” Alder Mike Feirer recalled. “If you want to have another crew that wants to save a historic building, you’ll find it. They’ll come out of the woodwork. The other building is Purdy building. The school system owned that building. They turned it over to these people and The Aster is a beautiful building.”
Feirer favors giving Jeffers more time to come back with a housing proposal.
Barg said he would reconnect with Jeffers on an updated housing proposal while also gathering estimates for demolition and site remediation.
The city’s lease with Weinbrenner for its current shoe factory operation expires June 30, at which time the city takes full control of the structure and its operational and maintenance costs.
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