Milwaukee County Board To Vote On Proposed Sale Of Downtown Park

The Milwaukee County Board will vote on Thursday whether to sell a nine-acre park near Lake Michigan to one of the biggest companies in the state.

Decades ago, Northwestern Mutual called itself “the quiet company,” but these days the firm is making lots of noise. A new Northwestern Mutual office tower is under construction on the north side of Wisconsin Avenue in Milwaukee. The company also wants to buy O’Donnell Park — a nine-acre, county-owned plot of land across the street that has a parking garage, pavilion and plaza with a view of Lake Michigan.

The company wants to pay about $14 million for the park, but park supporters are not quietly accepting the deal. One of them, Virginia Small, is concerned about the fate of bricks on the plaza that are marked with personalized inscriptions from private sponsors who helped pay for the creation of the park 25 years ago. Another park supporter, Barbara Aho, wonders what will happen to the park’s layout.

“There’s lots of native plants, trees, and it’s really sensitively designed and beautifully designed,” said Small.

Sandy Botcher, a vice president at Northwestern Mutual, said public access would not be lost should the company buy the park. She also said the company would spend millions of dollars to spruce up the parking garage and plaza.

“I can’t think of another corporate citizen who would make this sort of investment into O’Donnell, and agree to keep the garage open to the public, and agree to keep the green space open to the public,” said Botcher.

The Milwaukee County Board’s vote on the O’Donnell Park plan may be close. Some board members say they flat-out oppose selling parkland. Others, like Supervisor Patricia Jursik, say the $14 million price tag is far too low, and that the proposal should be amended. However, because Gov. Scott Walker signed a law last year that took powers away from the county board and gave them to the county executive, Jursik said the board only gets an up or down vote.

“We really cannot in any way try to amend what many of us see is an extremely bad deal,” Jursik said.

County Executive Chris Abele, however, said selling O’Donnell Park to Northwestern Mutual would be a good deal, and would generate $5 million to be put into other parks. He also argues that all other Wisconsin counties already give the county’s top official sole negotiating power.

“I know there’s this link to say this is all Walker,” Abele said. “It’s not that. It’s just about the way a legislative branch and executive branch usually works.”

The fight over O’Donnell Park could be a foreshadowing of other state and national battles, if fiscal conservatives succeed in selling more public land. Mike Carlson of the Madison-based land trust alliance Gathering Waters said one thing politicians should remember in those battles is that almost every property is special to someone.

“People really do have these really strong affinities and strong connections to individual parcels and have a really strong sense of place,” Carlson said.

And that’s what some in Milwaukee say they have for O’Donnell Park.