Adult education classrooms, in; new community hall, out. Enlarged and combined library, in; new racquetball court, out. Art gallery, in; outdoor pool, out. New storage area, expanded kosher kitchen, new parking lot plus loop road — in for the time being.
That’s how the Whitefish Bay Village Board on Monday, meeting as a committee of the whole, began crafting a motion that will determine how much of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s plans for renovation and expansion on the Karl Jewish Community Campus it might allow.
The board worked on a draft motion drawn up by village attorney Christopher Jaekels that covered the above-mentioned items and many other aspects of the MJF’s plans for the 27-acre campus.
Village residents living near the campus filed a protest petition last September that imposed a state law requiring that any rezoning of the area be approved by a supermajority vote of the seven-member board, i.e., six-to-one or seven-to-zero.
Therefore, the Bay board decided to exclude from the draft motion items in the plan that two trustees said they opposed. After more than three hours of discussion, these amounted to the proposed new community hall, new racquetball court, new family locker room and outdoor pool.
This does not mean that these items are excluded permanently from consideration. As village manager James Grassman told The Chronicle in a telephone interview Tuesday, they could be brought back during an official Village Board meeting.
“Everything they’ve done is still conditional,” said Bruce Block, attorney for the MJF, in a telephone conversation Tuesday. “What [the Village Board] is trying to do is establish a frame for looking at the package.”
Nevertheless, these preliminary decisions were “extraordinarily disappointing” to Stephen L. Chernof, chair of the MJF steering committee for the campus development project. “In effect, this is a rejection of the material parts of the proposal,” particularly in regard to the community hall, Chernof told The Chronicle after the meeting.
Jay Roth, executive vice president of the Harry & Rose Samson Jewish Community Center, told The Chronicle Tuesday that the “positive” parts of the board’s actions were “they began to deal with the space areas of the center and responded positively to a number of key areas.”
But Roth was concerned that the board excluded from the draft motion “not just the pool but other key areas of the building, including the community hall, and no center can survive without a community hall.”
Roth said the Bay government staff, JCC and MJF “need to work through some of these areas…. We need … to help the trustees better understand what our needs are.”
The next step is for the Bay staff to prepare a new motion incorporating all the changes the board members made. This new motion is scheduled to be brought to a board meeting on March 17.
In other developments, the board, still as a committee of the whole, voted five-to-two to reject selling 2.6 acres of village property next to the northwest corner of the campus to the MJF. Jaekels told The Chronicle Tuesday that this move probably “killed [the sale] completely” but that issues of “formality and propriety” may require a full board vote on it later.
The initial campus plans had called for construction of an outdoor pool on that land. At a previous meeting on Feb. 13, four Bay trustees expressed opposition to constructing the pool on either that land or on the campus as it stands, in effect removing the pool from consideration.
It is clear, however, that no adjustments to the plans will reduce the opposition of many of the immediate neighbors. During a brief public comment session, a woman in the audience who did not identify herself said that even with the changes, the plan is “just too big. That’s why it’s taking this long [to evaluate]. It belongs on a huge plot of land somewhere north of here. It doesn’t belong in Whitefish Bay.”
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