“We’re asking for your support to help us build a new family park,” Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center President Jay R. Roth told about 30 Mequon JCC members Tuesday.
Meeting at Beth El Ner Tamid Synagogue, the audience heard Roth and other JCC officials describe plans for a new Hy and Richard Smith JCC Family Park, to be located due east of the Sarah Chudnow Campus of the Jewish Home and Care Center.
The park would occupy seven-and-a-half acres. It would include an outdoor pool with a capacity of 450 bathers, whose features would include a “zero depth” entry, lap swimming area, a “leisure swimming” area and a water slide.
The plans also call for four tennis courts; a kosher snack bar; a children’s play area and party room; a bathhouse for changing; and a 150-car parking lot on the site.
Roth asked audience members to sign letters to city of Mequon officials, and to attend and speak in favor of the project at the Mequon Planning Commission meeting and public hearing scheduled for Monday, Aug.15, 7 p.m., at Mequon City Hall, 11333 N. Cedarburg Rd.
As Roth explained to both the attendees and to The Chronicle, the JCC is seeking a conditional-use permit for the site. Under the city’s law, that requires only approval of the Planning Commission, unless two aldermen or the mayor and a Common Council member request full council approval of the commission’s decision.
In the best-case scenario, the commission could grant approval on Aug. 15 or in September. If that happens, construction could soon begin and the facility could open by the summer of 2006, Roth said.
Roth said that after the Whitefish Bay village government approved plans for the Karl Campus expansion of the JCC’s primary building, JCC officials spoke with Mequon city officials about the possibility of construction of a family park to replace the similar site that existed in Bayside in the 1990s.
Roth said that after about a year of discussions, he and city officials concluded that the best site was on the some 70 acres of land that JHCC and JCC own — some separately, some jointly — south of Mequon Rd. between N. Oriole Lane and N. Port Washington Road.
City officials insisted that JCC officials act to prevent “JCC creep” — i.e., to make sure that the JCC would not come back in some years to propose opening a satellite JCC facility on the site, Roth said.
Therefore, the JCC will sell to the JHCC the rest of its land in the area, which is zoned residential, Roth said.
Roth said some local opposition is gathering, though “not at the same level” of intensity that some Whitefish Bay residents showed to the plans for the Karl Campus. He said opposition mostly comes from homeowners along Oriole Lane who are concerned about noise, traffic and “the not-in-my-backyard thing,” he said.
But the site is located in an area nearly surrounded by commercial structures (shopping centers and office buildings), the Sarah Chudnow Campus and empty land, Roth said. He also said the experience with the Bayside site shows that there will be “no heavy single period of traffic. There won’t be 75 cars arriving at one time.”
Roth also told the audience that all the potentially noise-making equipment at the site “will be underground,” and the JCC will take many other steps to “mitigate the sound” coming from the area.
Therefore, the site will have “minimal interference with the community,” Roth said. Moreover, as the JCC has “a lot of Mequon members,” Roth feels “hopeful that people in Mequon will see it as a community asset, which is what it will be.”
Plans call for the site to be open only to JCC members between Memorial Day and Labor Day; and open no later than 7:30 p.m., so it will not be using any lights. Roth said anticipated average usage would be 450 people on weekend days and 300 on weekdays.
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