Town poised to make offer on mill property

A resolution to the Waubeka Mill and Button Factory saga was scheduled to take another step forward Wednesday when the Fredonia Town Board was scheduled to consider making an offer to purchase the property from Charles Sheridan and his son.

The town would then turn the property along the Milwaukee River over to Ozaukee County.

The properties could be acquired via eminent domain, a law that allows governments to take private property for public use as long as owners receive fair market value.

The county late last year was awarded a grant from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. to assess whether the Waubeka Mill and Button Factory are a brownfield site in need of remediation.

The $142,800 grant is dependent on the site’s owner granting permission to the county and state Department of Natural Resources to access the site, according to a memo to the county Natural Resources Committee.

Last fall, the Town Board authorized Town Chairman Chris Janik to execute an intergovernmental agreement between the town and Ozaukee County so they can work together to demolish the buildings and give the parcels to the county, which likely would turn them into a boat launch and park, officials have said.

Both the mill and Button Factory buildings are dilapidated and are non-conforming structures located in a flood hazard zone and don’t meet setback requirements.

Neither have been in use for many years.

They “would not be buildable under any circumstances,” county Planning and Parks Director Andrew Struck said last fall.

Sheridan bought the Button Factory in a 1990 auction from Ozaukee County, and the county might get it back, along with the mill, which Sheridan bought in 2019 for $1,000 and later turned over to his son.

Sheridan, who lives in Illinois, grew up in Milwaukee and said he fell in love with the Milwaukee River in Waubeka when, as a student at Marquette University, he saw the buildings and old dam on a winter day.

Sheridan has been trying to turn the buildings into a number of businesses or residences for the past several years without success.

The largely dilapidated mill has asbestos, a cracked foundation, rotted support beams and a roof in need of repairs. Fuel leached into the ground below the road from a storage tank under the mill. Part of the roof once collapsed, exposing asbestos.

Plans for the Button Factory, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, fell through since it doesn’t meet setback requirements.

The idea of turning the factory into a commercial boathouse was shot down in 2022 because the building lacks the required 10-foot setback from the river.