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Q&A with Sturgeon Bay Community Development Director Marty Olejniczak

Sturgeon Bay Community Development Director Marty Olejniczak recently took some time to talk with Pulse reporter Matt Ledger about current development projects within the city. Photo by Katie Sikora.

Marty Olejniczak heads up the City of Sturgeon Bay’s Community Development department, which is responsible for reviewing and approving new city development. Matt Ledger sat down with Olejniczak to talk about some of the issues that are currently on his department’s radar.

Matt Ledger (ML): How are things on Egg Harbor Road with the Wal-Mart development? Is that wrapping up?

Marty Olejniczak (MO): Wal-Mart is nearing completion. The store’s been open for a few months now, but part of their approval was that they had to take down the old building. That’s going to be parking. And they had to build a large [stormwater] detention pond. Right now, they have a temporary detention pond they’re operating in, but the long-term plan has always been to get a big pond right in front there.

Everything else is pretty much good to go. They’ve occupied it; we’ve given them their occupancy permits. They’ve satisfied all our fire and building code issues.

Related to Wal-Mart, in our development agreement with them, they were required to do lots of upgrades. So they actually paid for those traffic signals and those turn lanes and those things you see down by the store. In addition to that, it contributed $150-some thousand dollars for future Egg Harbor Road improvements.

ML: Have any concerns from businesses potentially being impacted by Wal-Mart been voiced?

MO: We required Wal-Mart to do an economic impact analysis before we gave them approval, and that analysis for the most part showed that we had enough market here for most of what Wal-Mart sold. The lone exception was groceries. They really expanded their grocery line by becoming a supercenter and with the other two grocery stores…intuitively we kind of already knew this, that yeah unless they’re able to capture market from elsewhere, such as people from Algoma coming up or Green Bay or Northern Door, if that happens they all could survive, but otherwise it’s gonna be tough.

And it doesn’t mean that, for instance, Wal-Mart might not be the one that suffers if people continue to shop at Pick-n-Save and Econo Foods. So it’s not a given that one of them is going to go under, and it’s not a given that if one of them does go under that it’s not going to be Wal-Mart.

ML: What are the benefits of expanding it? What is that going to bring in?

MO: The biggest benefit we saw, at least from the economic impact study, is minimizing the leakage. A lot of our retail dollars are heading south to Green Bay is what the study showed. And, anecdotally, you hear stories. If you need home improvement goods you head down to Menards. If you’re going to buy $300 of groceries you head down to Woodman’s. It is hopeful that, by expanding, some of those dollars will stay in Sturgeon Bay and that what benefits Wal-Mart can also benefit other stores in the area. It’s too early to tell, but hopefully all of Egg Harbor Road and even all of downtown will be helped.

Once Wal-Mart announced they were going there, there’s been much more interest in the sites surrounding there, people wanting to capitalize on being close to Wal-Mart. We’re already seeing that with O’Reilly’s Auto Parts. They’ve got their approvals but they haven’t started construction yet. The city also sold property to a developer that’s going to start building a Maurices this year.

ML: Do you want to talk about the west waterfront redevelopment? How’s that progressing?

MO: The city completed, with the help of a consultant, a West Waterfront Redevelopment Plan. The area we’re looking at is basically the former Door County Cooperative site and a few satellite sites surrounding that. It’s a pretty tight area. We’re not looking at the whole West Side or anything.

The centerpiece of that is this Four Seasons Market, a new building on the waterfront that would be sort of the hub of Door County food products. It could also have other uses in there. There’s talk of a brewpub or other type of restaurant; there’s talk of meeting space, even residential on upper levels. But right now it’s just considered to be a two-story building, nothing too outrageous, down on the waterfront.

Also, the Maritime Museum has always had expansion plans, both a tower that got approved and also an expansion in the southerly direction. So the proposal was to save some land for them because they’re an anchor, and they do draw a lot of people to downtown.

We’d tear down all the old co-op buildings except for the granary itself. The idea is to keep that as an icon. Maybe there’ll be a new use if it’s feasible. It might not be feasible because that’s a really old structure, but even if it’s just there as an icon, it could still be a valuable thing to have there on the waterfront.

Other new uses on the old co-op site would be a hotel, and the theory on that is to try and gear that towards a more nationally flagged hotel, which is something there’s not a whole lot of in Door County. Particularly the upscale type stuff, like the Marriott and the Hilton and those types of things.

ML: So some kind of higher-end chain hotel?

MO: Right, so that people who maybe are earning points through business travel or something and want to take a vacation in Door County could take advantage of it. You know, if someone has two free nights at a Marriott-based hotel, well, there are none in Door County, so they might then say: ‘Oh, I’m gonna go vacation in Lake Geneva,” or something. There’s also talk of trying to go after an extended stay type of facility.

And finally, there’ll be a smaller commercial building. There’s not a lot of need for more retail in this area. Madison Avenue covers that function just fine, but we felt we needed something to kind of tie the two areas together so that you don’t have this big gap.

The other components are pretty much residential. There’s a site right across the street, and that’s looking at more workforce housing. Young journalists might want to live there, the nurses from the hospital, the people working at the government center would fit in real well there. You probably know there’s a lot more interest in downtown living today, both in bigger cities like Boston as well as smaller places. We really don’t have much of that right now.

And then the Coast Guard, we want to consolidate them and have them build a building that would be aesthetically pleasing and fit into the waterfront.

So that’s, in a nutshell, the plan. And this Four Seasons Market is really the lynchpin. We did a follow-up feasibility study on that; it’s currently underway.

This conversation has been edited for length.