Dear Editor,

As someone actively engaged in the special area planning process currently underway, I can’t help but to feel that as a community, we are going at this perhaps with two differing mindsets: one is planning for planning’s sake, check off the box, move on to the next thing, to the next part of the city. For me, for other Northside residents, it is about place-making; about creating a “vibrant and inviting place with harmonious and human-scaled design,” as our Imagine Madison Comprehensive Plan states. After all, this is Our Home Place. 

As we strive for equitable development, seek public involvement and ask for help in this place-making process, I understand better each time I attend a meeting that this is massive and it’s complicated. But it is really about where we call home. 

I can’t help but imagine driving up Packers Avenue with new streetlights, a few more traffic lights. On the corner of Commercial, filled with vacant retail and low-stacked apartments, there is a community space near The Bodgery and food carts are starting to line up for the dinner hour. In summer, there is live music and kids playing with bubbles while their parents sit nearby and chat about their day. Maybe they are drinking a beer from the Powerhouse Brewery, located in the old powerhouse on the Oscar Mayer property. I envision a small public garden with flowers in bloom in tribute to the workers of Oscar Mayer — our history.

As I travel north, I pass a line of cars turning right onto the newly completed Coolidge Avenue heading home to the Eken Park neighborhood (yes, the plan is for an average daily travel rate estimated to be around 5,000 cars a day). I choose not to turn left on to the new length of Coolidge that travels west to Sherman Avenue (yes there is a proposed road there) where there are several large apartment complexes surrounding a meager vestige of the Hartmeyer wetland and the sandhill crane family no longer nests there (yes, this is in the proposed plan concepts; let’s save ALL 30 acres please). 

I keep heading north and envision creatively designed apartment buildings that express the less harsh urban edge currently being built in other areas of the city. I have to admit, as we start to infill in area neighborhoods, I really like the smaller scale and cozy fronted apartments being built on Sherman near the Bear and Bottle. They feel like the right scale, the brick façade is a nice touch and it seems neighborly. (Call me old fashioned. I like natural building materials.) I see bike riders on the bike path that runs north along the railroad grade, connects (off road, I can dream can’t I?) across the new Coolidge Avenue and then heads north and connects with the trail on International Lane.

Because we are being told that the northern route of the BRT is not up for discussion at this point in time, it is hard to imagine the bus facility and a roadway lane dedicated to extended buses, or the routes it will run, or what the bus shelters will look like. Maybe we can request that as we develop the special area plan, we also work on the BRT plans for the Northside as well. They seem to go hand-in-hand as we look to the development of this expansive side of town, which includes transit, transfer points and roadways, and lots of future development to the northeast. Northside wheel tax-payers deserve to be at the table.

I have experienced conversations with area residents and policy makers, community leaders, that want to discuss saving all 30 acres of the Hartmeyer wetland, pedestrian/bike path routes, cross connection of roadways and neighborhoods, safety along Packers Avenue, the BRT, roundabouts, the bus facility, job creation and innovation, and so on. There is no lack of informed public opinion on these topics. It just seems that there is a lack of opportunity to share it with the city planners.

Thanks to the Northside Planning Council for offering to host a Community Roundtable on the Oscar Mayer Special Area Plan on Dec 4 at Lakeview Lutheran Church, from 6‒8 pm. Come learn about the concepts being proposed, and have your ideas blend with those of your neighbors, or not. But that is really the point. Place-making is a process not an outcome.

Thank you,

Beth Sluys