The night before the first evening of Passover, the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center came “out of the wilderness,” said center president Jay R. Roth.
That was the evening — Tuesday, April 11 — that the city of Mequon Common Council voted unanimously to approve the conditional use permit for the Hy and Richard Smith JCC Family Park.
“I’m ecstatic,” Roth told The Chronicle after the council vote. “And I’m excited that the community is now going to get a tremendous facility that it has patiently waited for” for some seven years.
Roth said the JCC hopes to begin construction of the facility by July 1 and have it open by Memorial Day in 2007.
And he added that with the Family Park plus construction of the remodeled and expanded JCC at the Karl Campus in Whitefish Bay and the new Daniel M. Soref Education and Retreat Center at the Albert and Ann Deshur JCC Rainbow Day Camp, Milwaukee’s Jewish community “will have a JCC it can cherish and be proud of.”
Roth said he was pleased that the project received unanimous support from both the Common Council and the Planning Commission, which recommended approval of the permit at its meeting on March 13.
That constitutes “recognition that the project will be good not only for the JCC but also for the Mequon community,” Roth said. “And I think that bodes well for our presence in Mequon.”
Bruce Block, attorney for the JCC, said during the public comments session that the JCC and Mequon city staff worked over the plans and studied the potential effects of the projects; and “we believe we’ve met every test” set out in the city’s ordinances and standards.
Surrounding land
Roth also said the JCC will sell land that it owns jointly with the Jewish Home and Care Center around the site for private development.
The fate of this land was one of the Common Council members’ key concerns in the approval of the project, to judge from the discussion at the meeting.
The Family Park will be set onto seven-and-a-half acres of land south of Mequon Road between Market Street to the east and Oriole Lane to the west.
The JCC and JHCC own that land plus some 33 acres to the south of the site and five-and-a-half acres to the north between the site and Mequon Road.
This land is zoned residential. However, Mequon ordinances allow for certain “conditional uses” of residential zoned property, including creation of outdoor recreational facilities, said city attorney John DeStefanis during the discussion.
As a condition for receiving the conditional use permit, JCC and JHCC agreed to restrict sale of that land only for residential development. Moreover, Common Council members made it clear that they wanted that land developed only for residential uses, not for any other non-residential conditional uses.
This land is also zoned for residential density of one unit per acre; and council members said they did not want that density changed.
Council member Susan Nelson, representing District 6 in which the Family Park will be located, had expressed opposition to the project at Planning Commission meetings.
At the council meeting, she spoke about how neighbors of the project had objections to possible noise, increases of traffic, decreases of property values, and creation of unforeseen problems similar to some that arose from the JHCC’s Sarah Chudnow Campus on Market Street.
She also said the neighbors had a “lack of trust” in promises they had received and feared a “death by 1,000 cuts” from new projects being approved “in bits and pieces.”
Nevertheless, she also said that lack of trust would be “simple to fix” and that she sought “enforceable promises.” She got an assurance from the city attorney that the council could make sure that no further non-residential conditional uses could be made of that land.
Mequon Mayor Christine Nuernberg said that “no one had more reservations and concerns than I” about the project. But with the restrictions on development and what else she learned, “I really think the facility is going to be an addition” and have “positive impact” on Mequon.
The plans call for construction of an outdoor pool and diving well, a clubhouse, tennis courts, a picnic area, a playground and a parking lot. The facility would be open only during the summer and not late at night.
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