Pristine is overrated

Advocates push to save an urban wetland as part of the Oscar Mayer redevelopment

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The pond, almost hidden behind a dentist’s office and Kavanaugh’s Esquire Club just off North Sherman Avenue, isn’t the crown jewel of wetlands. It’s full of invasive reed canary grass and cattails. Alongside it on Roth Street, people are parked and living out of their RVs.

But northside residents point to 200-year-old oak trees, and say that the area is a haven for wildlife, including fox, turtles, waterfowl, redwinged blackbirds and a nesting pair of sandhill cranes. 

Both the pond and surrounding uplands and woods are part of a 30-acre parcel owned by the Hartmeyer family (of local ice arena fame) and leased for years by Oscar Mayer. The parcel is included in the Oscar Mayer Strategic Area Plan (OMSAP) and will likely be purchased and redeveloped going forward. The plan earmarks the area for economic development, living wage jobs and affordable housing.

As the city moves through the process of approving the strategic plan as a guideline for redevelopment, at issue is how many acres should be saved as greenspace.

The wettest part — the pond of three to four acres and adjacent marsh — will be preserved. But there’s little agreement as to how much more of the surrounding land should be kept as greenspace.

An early draft of the plan preserved just eight acres, the pond and marsh. After feedback from the neighborhood, greenspace was increased to 14 acres, with eight acres as wetland and the additional six acres developed as a city park.

But the Friends of  Hartmeyer Natural Area have proposed to save all 30 acres of the Hartmeyer parcel as greenspace, with no development.  A compromise brought forward by Ald. Syed Abbas maps out a 20-acre nature preserve that would still include some housing and mixed-use development.

“Parks are good,” says Dan McAuliffe, a city planner. “But the need isn’t there. The question is what we lose from housing.”

Friends of Hartmeyer disagrees. “If you have this kind of undeveloped tract right in the city,” says Friends group member Beth Sluys, “why would you not want to preserve it?”

Rich Beilfuss, a hydrologist and fellow with the UW-Madison Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, testified before the Parks Commission in favor of preserving 30 acres of greenspace.

“It’s a working wetland,” says Beilfuss, who is also president and CEO of the International Crane Foundation. Although there are invasives, he says it is “an impressive urban wetland in a surprisingly tight space,” with value for both wildlife and stormwater absorption.

Beilfuss characterizes Hartmeyer as a freshwater marsh. While topographic maps dating to the late 1800s show the entire area as wetland, the parcel was likely drained for farming some time in the early 20th century. Aerial photos from the 1930s through the 1980s show the area dry. At some point, several baseball fields were constructed there, outlines of which are still visible from aerial photography.  

Wetland began to re-emerge in the late 1990s. One theory is that after Oscar Mayer stopped pumping from its own high capacity wells about that time, the wetland returned. Another theory is that increased rainfall due to climate change prompted the resurgence. “Wetlands have a way of reclaiming themselves,” Beilfuss says. 

Paul Noeldner, chair of Friends of Hartmeyer Natural Area, leads nature walks for kids on the site as part of Madison FUN (Friends of Urban Nature). He’s made a long list of wildlife observed on the site, including 56 bird species, and identified native cattail in the marsh, and large stands of milkweed — crucial to monarch butterflies — including Sullivant’s (Prairie Milkweed), a Wisconsin threatened species.

“You don’t pave an urban natural area when you have one,” says Noeldner. “Once it’s gone, it’s gone.”

The 30-acre parcel is bounded by North Sherman Avenue to the west, Roth Street to the north, the railroad tracks to the east and extends all the way to Commercial Avenue only nearest the tracks. The compromise plan proposed by Abbas expands the 14-acre plan a block to the east.

Beilfuss believes preserving 30 acres instead of 14 as greenspace is important for wildlife, not because the additional 16 acres of land are high quality — much of it is currently a parking lot — but because the space is needed as a buffer between the wetland and the proposed housing and commercial development. 

“The more buffer you have, the more opportunities there are for wildlife,” says Beilfuss. “If you develop right to the edge, the more sensitive species will leave, abandon the area.” It’s not clear, though, how much extra space wildlife needs as a buffer: “It’s hard to say an exact area that would make a difference.”

“Alone, it’s not vital to cranes, but it is part of a mosaic of sites that collectively are important,” Beilfuss notes. He doesn’t think it matters whether it’s a pristine example of a wetland: “It provides real value now.”

Dan McAuliffe of city planning describes the proposed housing on the Hartmeyer parcel as “fairly intense.” The plan to add 395 housing units on that 30 acres means it’s much denser than the surrounding neighborhoods, but is in line with the city’s comprehensive plan for the area, which is seeking to accommodate a projected growth in population of 70,000, or 40,000 new households, by 2040. “That’s a lot of people,” McAuliffe says.

The Oscar Mayer Special Area Plan includes more land than just the former Oscar Mayer plant and the Hartmeyer land. The area plan encompasses areas northeast of Aberg Avenue (including behind Pick ’N Save) and along Pennsylvania Avenue and the railroad corridor as far south as First Street. Overall, the plan seeks to add 2,500 housing units to the area.

The Hartmeyer site is especially attractive because it is adjacent to a proposed transit hub. The parcel, when developed, would contain multi-family housing in several configurations, mostly low-medium (two to four stories) and medium residential (three to six stories) along with some buildings as tall as 10 stories in the area closest to the railroad tracks. New streets would go through the area; some would extend Huxley and Ruskin Streets through from Aberg to Commercial.

McAuliffe notes that the planning process found that the area is not deficient in parks. While the planned residential density on the Hartmeyer parcel calls for a small neighborhood park, larger nearby parks like Demetral and even Warner Park and Cherokee Marsh check off boxes for larger open spaces for the area. 

Sluys, of the Hartmeyer friends group, says members strongly support housing and development but doesn’t see how that goal and preserving the wetland are mutually exclusive. She has suggested that housing units be shifted to other areas in the plan already slated for housing and mixed development —  maintaining the overall density by making some taller. 

But McAuliffe says that’s not really feasible. The soil in the area is “hydric,” meaning it is already wet and cannot absorb more water in big rains. That means that none of the multi-unit housing planned for the area can have underground parking — “no subterranean spaces,” says McAuliffe. That, in turn, limits how high the housing can go (as does the site’s proximity to the Dane County Regional Airport). To make every building as tall as regulations would allow would result in “an almost unbuildable density,” says McAuliffe.

McAuliffe says that the hydric soil also means that keeping the area as greenspace won’t help prevent flooding in the area during big rains, as proponents of the 30-acre natural area have argued.

The Oscar Mayer strategic plan will be before the Plan Commission June 29. Discussion at the June 10 Board of Parks Commissioners meeting, held virtually via Zoom, centered on the area’s need for affordable housing and jobs versus the need for greenspace. Equity consultant on the project, Annette Miller of Equity by Design, said that people in her focus groups were more interested in jobs and affordable housing than a park. 

Funding a park larger than 14 acres is also problematic. The 14-acre park would be paid for through developer dedication fees. Any additional acreage would have to be paid for by the city.

The Parks commission voted 6-1 June 10 to approve the plan with 14 acres of park, although several members of the committee wanted a big asterisk on that approval, saying they would like to see other avenues investigated for funding a larger greenspace, and that they would like to see environmental testing.

Abbas is concerned about several aspects of the current plan. “The land is so wet,” says Abbas, “and the water table is so high.” He’s walked problem areas in the nearby neighborhoods he represents: “The basements are like swimming pools.” Yet the city does not seem to be heeding this problem. “Why would you put more housing on a wetland?” Abbas asks. He doubts that the additional six acres earmarked as city park will be usable for recreation.

Abbas feels the city is rushing the process, and not investigating partnerships with Dane County or other conservation agencies to buy the parcel outright. Noeldner, chair of the Friends group, thinks the group that is redeveloping the Oscar Mayer buildings into the multi-use OM Station should be approached for support: “It’s an amenity for them, too.”

Abbas notes there has been no soil or water testing at the site and “there is a lot of concern about contamination. We have no idea what is in the soil.”

The Hartmeyer estate is suing Kraft Heinz over a series of fuel spills there over the years. 

A June 8 city planning memo to the parks commission states that “staff does not have concerns about the appropriateness of future development” because “redevelopment is often the most effective tool in remediating brownfield properties.” Staff also argued that “by obtaining a portion of the property through parkland dedication, the city would be insulated from financial responsibility of any needed remediation, as the developer would be responsible for remediation for the entire site.”

Maria Powell, executive director of the Midwest Environmental Justice Organization, is very concerned about the Oscar Mayer site, which has never been fully evaluated for industrial contamination. “Any kind of digging will disturb what [contaminants] are in the soil,” Powell notes.

In 2016, then-Mayor Paul Soglin told Isthmus that “the [Oscar Mayer] parcel has a negative value of between $10 and $20 million,” figuring in the estimated cost of remediating contaminated soil at the plant.

McAuliffe says that although the state Department of Natural Resources has a “couple of open sites” on the Oscar Mayer property, “environmental engineers have not expressed concern.” However, the strategic plan itself acknowledges that “the management of contaminated soils is a factor that can potentially impact the financial viability of redevelopment and will need to be addressed prior to any redevelopment projects.”

The strategic plan is next before the Sustainable Madison committee on June 23 at 4:30 p.m.