Appleton Redevelopment Authority Receives Update On Plans For Valley Transit Center

The Appleton Redevelopment Authority met 08/10/2022. One of the information items they received was an update from Valley Transit General Manager Ron McDonald on the Valley Transit Center analysis.

He told the ARA that the College North Neighborhood study had just been completed. One of the areas that plan designated as high priority was the redevelopment of the transit center.

Valley Transit put out a request for proposal to conduct a study and ended up hiring an architectural firm called LHB which had also partnered with a couple of other firms to assist with the project. The team of architects had an abundance of experience in joint development transit center projects, primarily ones with a transit center on the first floor and a multi-use, primarily residential, facility above it.

Valley Transit had two meetings thus far with LHB. One of the things Valley Transit asked them to prioritize was determining if the current transit center location was the correct site. Valley Transit believed that their current location was the appropriate location for a new transit center; however, they understood there might be others who disagreed with them and so asked the architectural firm to evaluate the current location vs other potential locations in close proximity to the current location. They wanted to stay exclusively in the central downtown business district in order to be a viable transportation system. [It’s a little hard to image that a firm would come back a report that the current location was not the correct one given that they are being paid by Valley Transit and Valley Transit has made it clear they prefer the current location.]

The report from LHB would either confirm the current site was the best location or indicate it was not and provide analysis as to why it was or was not. Valley Transit expected to have that report within the next few weeks.

Once they had that report, then they would start holding focus group meetings. They were still putting together a list of members for the focus group. At this point, the list was quite extensive and included the Appleton Redevelopment Authority, the team that put together the College North Neighborhood plan, all of the surrounding businesses, all of the high transit users, and the Transit Commission.

He noted that the transit center project was not just a City of Appleton project but was a Fox Cities project. Valley Transit partners with a total of 9 municipalities in all three counties in the region, so all of those municipalities would have a voice and a final say in how the project moved forward and whether the project even should move forward.

Once they had a site for the transit center selected (and he reiterated he believed it would be the current site), then they would have to start moving forward with making sure that they had the appropriate land at that site. One of the discussions they would have would be about acquiring the property directly to the north of the current transit center, the greenspace which used to be the location of the Menn Law Firm.

Before Valley Transit could purchase that land, they would have to go in and complete the environmental analysis and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) process would have to be gone through. If they purchased it before that process was completed, they ran the risk of being told that they couldn’t develop the land in the way they wanted.

So, they wanted to confirm the location of the transit center and then start moving forward with the environmental analysis, acquire the old Menn Law Firm property, and then started talking to developers to see who was interested in a multi-use transit center development.

Community and Economic Development Director Karen Harkness went into more detail about the former Menn Law Firm property. The city acquired the land in 2017 and had conducted a phase one and a phase two of mitigating the site. They found benzene in monitoring well number 4 and small amounts of another toxic in wells one and two. They were, however, legally allowed to pause their mitigation efforts, and because they weren’t certain how the site was going to develop, they decided to utilize that option to pause.

They still had the monitoring wells there and were still required to test those monitoring wells, but the site would be mitigated differently depending on if it was going to be a parking lot, have a building build on it, or be green space. So, they were not moving forward with mitigation at this point. They did get a lot of the environmental work done and would just need to pick up where they left off and find out what the DNR wanted them to do.

Even back in 2017 they knew that the site was going to be an integral component of some development, but they just didn’t know what it was going to be. If Valley Transit stayed at that location, they hoped to emulate what Eau Claire and LaCrosse did with their transit centers, with the transit center on the first floor and housing up above. The discussions General Manager McDonald had mentioned the Community and Economic Development Department holding with developers would be about that.

A committee member asked if they envisioned a total rebuild of the transit center or just a remodel and expansion.

General Manager McDonald answered that that was not his wheelhouse, but his expectation was that they would probably have to start from scratch, given that it was going to be a multi-level facility and it was unlikely that the current structure would physically support additional floors.

The ARA chairwoman asked what they would do during construction when they had no center.

General Manager McDonald responded that was a good question and they had not yet figured out the answer, though they had discussed that with LHB.

View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=980229&GUID=ADE9FFEE-80F3-4AF4-A9E5-1DCA767CD697