Coal Dock Park may join list of pricey Port projects

The City of Port Washington is facing some big ticket items in its future, such as painting and maintaining the lighthouse it acquired last year, the potential construction of a new firehouse and the annual need to repair streets — and you may be able to add improvements to Coal Dock Park to that growing list.

Ald. John Sigwart has asked Mayor Marty Becker to appoint a task force to begin planning the next phase of development of the park, saying that while Coal Dock Park is one of the city’s premier parks, it is incomplete with plenty of promise.

Funding these projects will be a challenge, since levy limits and budget caps make it difficult to add large-ticket items to the budget, City Administrator Mark Grams said.

Sigwart said this week he believes that if the park plan garners enough community support, the committee may be able to raise the funds for the park improvements.

But if that doesn’t happen, the city would be faced with going to a binding referendum to seek permission to finance the work, Grams said.

Sigwart presented Becker with a list of about 12 residents — none of them appointed or elected city officials —willing to serve on the new Coal Dock Park committee, saying it’s important to begin the hard work of realizing the park’s potential.

“I want to get the planning started,” Sigwart told the Common Council on April 3. “If we don’t get it started now, it will never happen.”

There’s much that can be done with the park, which Sigwart said in an interview is “outsized and underutilized.”

“The park’s beautiful, but it’s incomplete,” he said. “I’d really like to get Coal Dock Park done.”

Coal Dock Park opened in September 2013, after more than a decade of planning to convert the former industrial land to a premier recreational area.

The park was created on what was once the We Energies coal dock, where a mountain of coal sat waiting to fuel the power plant.

The city gained the parkland after We Energies converted the power plant from one powered by coal to a facility fueled by natural gas.

In 2009, the Coal Dock Park Committee created a $27 million, decade-long plan to guide development of the park, envisioning amenities such as walking trails, a multiuse community center, themed interactive area, performance area, observation tower and deep-water docks.

The initial $2 million plan has been supplemented by such additions as the memorial pavilion, a World War II memorial and a railing along the promenade, but there is still work that can be done, Sigwart said.

Among the ideas for the park that have been suggested are a windbreak that would shield those in the park from the brisk lake winds and creation of a bridge linking the park to downtown.

Creation of a new park plan is a project Sigwart said he’s been considering since he was elected to the Common Council in 2017.

Some people believe the city should implement the original park plan, Sigwart said, but he believes it should be updated before any new projects are done.

“It’s been 10 years. It’s time to update the plan,” he said. “If that plan gets implemented, fine, but we need to take another look at it first.”

Sigwart said the task force could use the original plan as a stepping off point but members shouldn’t feel limited by it.

He said that if the group is created now, it will have 18 months to come up with a new plan and budget in time for an advisory referendum to be held in fall 2020, during the presidential election, when turnout is sure to be high.

“We’ll probably have an 85% turnout,” Sigwart predicted. 

That’s important, he said, because he wants the community to get behind any decision on the park’s development.

“I want the decision to be a mandate,” he said. “I want the community to buy into whatever we do there.”

That’s one reason he doesn’t want to see officials on the task force, Sigwart said.

“This needs to be a community effort,” he said.  “I want involvement. I want the community to do a lot of research and come back with ideas. The community has to buy into this.”