City to spend $825,000 more on South Taylor Drive-Washington Ave. intersection

By Bob Petrie
Sheboygan Press staff

Sheboygan plans to spend $825,000 next year to improve one of the city's busiest intersections, at South Taylor Drive and Washington Avenue, just blocks north of where Wal-Mart wants to build a 212,000-square-foot Supercenter. The street improvements include new turn lanes and signal replacements at the Taylor-Washington intersection, to handle traffic growth expected in the surrounding area by 2015, city officials said. The city money would be in addition to about $1.5 million in other road improvements in the area that Wal-Mart has already agreed to pay for to handle extra traffic from its planned Supercenter at Germaine Avenue and South Taylor Drive. "It's a substantial amount of money, but it's money that's going to be well invested with all the growth that's been occurring down there," Mayor Juan Perez said of the city's traffic improvements. "We can't ignore the growth that we've been promoting." The city-funded improvements were required by the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, said Tom Holtan, city public works director and engineer, and are not related to the Wal-Mart project. The DOT also agreed to drop its earlier plan for the city to build a string of five roundabout intersections along Washington Avenue, Holtan said. "We're not putting in roundabouts, so the state said you've got to put in extra turn lanes for the 2015 traffic," Holtan said. The city money is already part of the 2006 capital improvement budget, but the Common Council must approve a revision in its development agreement with Wal-Mart to include the new street improvements. Work would start in the spring, Holtan said. The Taylor-Washington street improvements fall within a city tax-incremental financing district, which the future Wal-Mart would be a part of. Debt service on the city borrowing for the improvements would be retired over the next few years by property taxes generated from the increased value of the property within the district. The city balked at installing roundabouts on Washington Avenue, which the DOT had suggested at the Interstate 43 interchange, at Taylor Drive, and at Greenwing Drive. "We didn't like the chain of five of them," Holtan said. "There's right-of-way issues, access issues." Perez said he was "thrilled" the city would not have to build the roundabouts. "There aren't too many people who like those things and want to mess with them," the mayor said. Scott Nelson, a DOT traffic engineer, said the agency would have preferred the roundabouts, which they believe help move traffic safer and better. "Roundabouts in our estimation may have been a better solution, but we've agreed to these improvements they're going to do … and we'll see how it works," Nelson said. Holtan said the city asked Wal-Mart to help cover some of the cost for the additional improvements, "but that wasn't going to happen." "It's not from their development that these (improvements) need to be done," Holtan said. "It's for future development." Holtan said Wal-Mart's proposed traffic improvements would help to ease heavy volume already at Taylor and Washington. The most recent figures available show 28,000 vehicles use the intersection each day. Ryan Swanson, a design engineer for ARC Design Resources of Rockford, Ill., which is handling Wal-Mart's permitting process with the city, could not be reached for comment. Neither Perez nor Holtan know when Wal-Mart expects to break ground for the Supercenter.

Reach Bob Petrie at bpetrie@sheboygan-press.com and 453-5143.