Wood Specialists Reinspecting Potawatomi Tower
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This time, it’s been commissioned by the state
A familiar company was on site at the Potawatomi State Park Observation tower this week to update its inspection, this time commissioned by Gov. Tony Evers and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR).
The state hired Oregon-based Wood Research and Development (WRD) to update its first inspection of the tower from 2019 that was initially done for the Sturgeon Bay Historical Society Foundation (SBHSF).
“We’ve got a team there now and they’re gathering measurements on the tower to check and update the inspection we completed a couple years ago,” said Dan Tingley, WRD’s senior engineer and wood technologist for the company’s global operation.
Tingley said Tuesday evening by phone that it would only be natural for the tower to have more decay today than it did in 2019.
“We’re trying to get the extent of it,” he said. “How much more and where it has grown.”
Tingley put Kim King, WRD’s senior engineer for the United States, on the job.
“I felt like this tower was important enough and a hot topic for several years and I just wanted one of my best people there,” Tingley said.
The DNR closed the 75-foot tower to the public in 2017 because of safety concerns about wood decay. The SBHSF, responding to a DNR report that concluded the tower couldn’t be fixed, hired Tingley’s firm to assess the tower’s condition. Tingley had concluded in his 2019 report that the tower, with $250,000-worth of maintenance on the most deteriorated of the structure’s Western red cedar timbers, could be fixed, reopened and serve the public for another 90 years.
“It was nowhere near in bad enough condition to warrant taking it down – ever,” Tingley said.
Demolition had been in the DNR’s plans in 2020. The agency retracted that decision once the SBHSF got the tower listed on the National Register and State Register of Historic Places. The latest development is new conceptual plans the state ordered and released in January of this year. Those plans included an option to repair the tower, but only with the addition of a 1,300-foot helical ramp at a cost of $6,058,800. Both Rep. Joel Kitchens (R-Sturgeon Bay) and Sen. André Jacque (R-DePere), supportive of the tower’s repair, said the expensive project was not necessary and would not be supported in the state budget when the tower could be repaired for about $500,000.
The tower’s repair has been the public’s stated desire, coming in the form of three surveys – two of those conducted by the DNR – and numerous letters and resolutions from all stakeholders including from the Town of Nasewaupee where the state park is located, the County of Door, the City of Sturgeon Bay, the Door County Historical Museum, Destination Door County and both Kitchens and Jacque.
The governor’s office reached out to Tingley about two months ago to talk about WRD’s 2019 report. Those conversations led to WRD’s current commission to update that report.
“My sense is, from talking with them, that they realized they need to do the maintenance and restore it,” Tingley said.
Tingley has maintained all along that ADA accessibility is not required for the repair of the historic structure – “every old building in the country that was 100 years old would be torn down if you had to make them all wheelchair accessible when you maintained them,” he said.
He uses Washington Island’s Mountain Lookout as an example. The town closed the 60-year-old tower in late 2020 due to needed repairs. In 2021, the town’s electors authorized the town to borrow money to fix the tower and hired Tingley’s company to assess and repair it – which has been completed for about $150,000, Tingley said.
Tingley said the updated report of Potawatomi tower’s condition would be completed in a couple of weeks.
