Park development plan option 2.
One of two designs for the north parcel of Garver Feed Mill includes a 2.7-acre off-leash dog park.
A new off-leash dog park for Madison’s near east side is in play again. The city’s Parks Division has revived the north parcel of the Garver Feed Mill land as a potential 2.7-acre dog park.
Controversy is assured. The conflict between dog owners wanting to exercise their pets versus park users who are dog shy or who prefer a more natural park setting (sans dogs), is guaranteed to cause a stir.
Leaving room for a tactical retreat, park planners have advanced two preliminary designs for the parcel — one with a dog park, the other without.
The move is certainly gutsy. A Garver site as a dog park has been shot down before, as have two other close-by parks, O.B. Sherry and Eastmorland, that planners judged appropriate for an off-leash park.
As many east-siders know from experience, few issues incite more unneighborly arguments than the volatile topic of free-range dogs. There has already been some grumbling about the addition of new parking spaces, which are part of both preliminary designs. The city says it has received more than 2,000 surveys on the new proposal and will conduct a Zoom hearing on Dec. 7 at 6 p.m. (The surveys are not yet available for reviewing.)
Key players in the drama are treading lightly. Ald. Dina Nina Martinez-Rutherford, whose district includes the Garver Feed Mill land, says she can support either plan because she feels they’re both great. Davy Mayer, vice president of the Schenk-Atwood-Starkweather-Yahara neighborhood association, says, “I don’t have a strong opinion. There are lots of pros and cons.” In a joint communique, the nearly 20 tenants of the Garver Feed Mill and their landlord, Baum Revision, are upbeat about the new planning, but conspicuously silent on favoring one plan over the other.
This is a tetchy topic for sure. The Garver property has a long-tangled history of broken dreams that eventually yielded a notable success. The mill itself dates to 1905 as a sugar beet processing plant. Bankruptcy eventually led to a farmers’ feed mill. When that business petered out, Olbrich Botanical Society bought it for a major expansion of nearby Olbrich Gardens. That never happened.
Neither did the senior housing, the arts incubator, the fruit grove, the dog park, and more recently the 50 extended-stay micro-lodges that Baum Revision wanted to build but could not demonstrate financing to the city’s satisfaction. What did launch was Baum’s impressive restoration of the dilapidated mill complex that the city had outright failed to maintain after buying it from the botanical society for $1. Architectural and historical groups have heaped praise on the restoration and the repurposing of the iconic building.
Now the question is what vision replaces unbuilt micro-lodges? At stake is a tract of land that is largely untended with marsh, meadow, fallen trees, invasive plants, ticks, wildlife and contaminants. It’s a wild space in other words.
Park development plan option 1.
A second design plan calls for walking trails through a natural area.
Veteran Ald. Marsha Rummel, who persistently advocated for both the mill renovation and a dog park, says she’s learned that community placemaking decisions require “the long view.” Both vision and patience are needed to get it right. These decisions may take not months but years and even decades to triumph.
She points out how the Capitol East District plan plotted the successful revitalization of long moribund East Washington Avenue from Blair Street to the Yahara River and how the Union Corners plan built upon that success. Her message: This work takes time.
Nothing in Madison history compares, of course, to the epic struggle of nearly six decades to build a Frank Lloyd Wright design for the Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center. Still, it’s sobering to consider that, on and off, for more than 35 years City Hall has fruitlessly pondered the fate of the Garver property. (This reporter first wrote about the failed senior housing option in the mid-1980s.)
In recent years, the land has been used for a concrete-crushing operation related to the nearby Atwood Avenue reconstruction. Functionally that has made sense for the roadbuilders. In terms of placemaking, well, not so much. Garver Mill shops complain the noise has driven away customers.
A few weeks ago, three Parks staffers — planning and development manager Ann Freiwald and landscape architects Adam Kaniewski and Michael Sturm — sat down to discuss the challenge in accommodating the sharply conflicting demands for the proposed park.
“We’re trying to balance the use of the land as public green space, while preserving as much of the site as a possible wildlife corridor,” said Sturm.
“That’s the challenge we deal with in all our parks — the balance between providing for wildlife and providing for recreation,” added Kaniewski, the project leader.
Everybody will get their say, Freiwald said, and Parks will listen. “We may be able to implement some of their ideas, or we may not. If we don’t, that doesn’t mean they weren’t heard.”
Freiwald thinks the public may be evenly split on what to do. “Then we’ll just have to make a decision,” she said.
Her take is that Garver is better suited for a dog park than either Eastmorland or O.B. Sherry were. She cautions that because the Parks Division requires at least two acres for a dog park, there just aren’t many available sites on the near east side if Garver is rejected.
Sturm raised an issue that further complicates the Garver choice. The land is a brownfield site due to pockets of petroleum contamination from old railroad lines. The city is working with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources on an onsite remediation plan, he said. This will involve spreading a “clean soil cap” of at least 12 inches over the contaminated land. Freiwald calls it “a very common problem and a very common solution.”
Rummel’s thinking about the dog park, meanwhile, has evolved. “I might think the Garver property would be great, but it creates so much anguish I have to ask if it’s worth it? There’s so much competition for that space.
“My long game now has turned to Starkweather Park,” she adds. This is a relatively small and obscure conservation park adjacent to the 65-acre Voit Farm, which is in the early stages of design for a major new neighborhood, with roughly 1,100 housing units. A dog park has been discussed as a possible feature of a larger park for the new community.
Calling it the view from 30,000 feet, Rummel sees the dog park as part of a dramatic greenway running from the marsh by Highway 30 through Starkweather Creek through Eastmorland, O.B. Sherry and a new Garver Park into Lake Monona. The Friends of Starkweather Creek, an environmental group, has advocated for this sort of Big Picture vision as well. (The group argues though that the odor of a dog park will drive wildlife away.)
How all this shakes out could happen quicker than you think. Parks has an expeditious timeline for a Garver Park decision. A second public input session is scheduled for late February 2024. The Board of Park Commissioners will pick a development plan later in the spring. The city council will weigh in. Construction could begin in 2025. That is the plan at least. Whether there is a consensus to move ahead is anybody’s guess.
