The story about Milwaukee’s lakefront gets ever more curious. Would you believe the city is considering building a hotel on the lakefront? Sources tell me that Milwaukee Department of City Development Commissioner Rocky Marcoux has been floating a major redevelopment plan that would redraw a road (Lincoln Memorial Drive?) near the Milwaukee Art Museum and replace green space with several buildings, including a hotel.
A designer’s proposed plan, I’m told, was shared with a staff member of the Milwaukee Art Museum, but not with its high-powered board, which upset some board members. (The board includes Milwaukee Magazine Publisher Betty Quadracci.) Board member and business executive Sheldon Lubar confirmed that museum officials had learned about a lakefront development proposal that included a hotel.
“We spent $135 million to put the premiere building in Wisconsin there and we’ve never even been advised on this plan,” Lubar complained. “How can you do this and not consult a major player?”
Marcoux was on vacation and did not respond to phone calls, so I called Patrick Curley, chief of staff for Mayor Tom Barrett. Curley said the idea was news to him. Later, he called back to say Marcoux knew of no such proposal. “That doesn’t mean a proposal won’t come along at some point,” Curley added, just to cover all bets. (Update, 3:20, 5/19/09 Curley argues this is misleading: his point was that some future developer may come in the door with such an idea, but no one has to date.)
Lubar speculates that this was “a developer’s idea and he collared some city folks.” Lubar and the board members, who donated a historically unprecedented amount of money to the museum addition, are concerned that new lakefront buildings like a hotel could obscure the view of the Calatrava. “The idea,” Lubar says, “just seems so off-base.”
Not to worry, Sheldon. Whatever that proposal was, it no longer exists, and officially speaking, never actually did.
Will the US Bank Championship Croak?
This is one of those stories that shows what a truly small town Milwaukee is. About a decade ago, Dan Croak was appointed director of the Greater Milwaukee Open. His father, Fran Croak, had been the volunteer board president, Dan says. “After I became president, he disassociated himself from the board.”
Not quite. Fran remained as an “ex-officio” member of the board and was involved in negotiating the contract with the major sponsor of what became known as the US Bank Championship. But in January, US Bank announced that after six years (2004 through 2009), it would no longer sponsor the championship. Bill Bertha, a marketing executive for US Bank, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel the company was unhappy with the poor attendance and low TV ratings for the tournament. “A very good analogy is that we threw a million-dollar party for Milwaukee and Wisconsin… and nobody showed up,” Bertha said.
“We’re not blaming anybody,” he added, but the situation certainly seemed to leave Dan behind the 8-ball. Now Fran has stepped back in as board president of the tournament. It’s a temporary step, says Dan, “just to see us through this situation, this loss of sponsorship.” There’s no chance Fran will keep the president position long-term, says Dan, noting his dad “is 80 years old.”
Fran says it was felt he should come back “since I negotiated the other sponsorships.” He added that Dan will not report to him, but to the vice president of the group’s board, business executive Curt Culver.
Years ago, the late Jane Pettit was a donor to the golf tournament, and Fran Croak oversees the Jane B. Pettit Foundation. Could Foundation money be used for new donations? Dan Croak answers this way: “It’s not the preferred method. Could we go back to that fund for a year, yeah. But it’s really not a long-term solution.”
The idea would seem to present a huge conflict of interest, as Fran would be funding the tournament where his son, as of the group’s most recent (2007) federal tax filing, was earning $141,518 in total compensation. But Fran says there’s no way the Pettit money can be tapped. “We couldn’t do that if we wanted to. She put some restrictions on how it could be used.”
The 2007 federal tax form for the nonprofit golf tournament also shows its annual expenses are $7.6 million. The biggest expense is the purse – the $4 million that is divided up by winning players. About half of its revenue comes from the PGA tour, which gives the Milwaukee tournament $3.4 million. The PGA co-sponsors all of its tournaments and shares the national TV revenue it gets with each of the local events. The other major portion of the Milwaukee tournament’s revenue is some $3.5 million in “tickets and revenue packages.” This would include the US Bank contribution (the JS estimates it at $1.4 million, but Dan Croak says that is inaccurate) and many other smaller sponsors.
Dan says “we remain optimistic that we will be able to find a new sponsor.” This is somewhat at odds with his earlier statement to the Journal Sentinel that some potential sponsors were skittish because of congressional criticism of financial companies sponsoring golf tournaments. But Dan now says “it’s a tremendous value proposition for companies. Companies looking into it will see this.”
And if they don’t? “If we can’t get corporate sponsorship,” he adds, “the most likely result is the tournament will go away.”
The Carley Legacy
The late businessman and politician David Carley died last week. He twice ran for governor unsuccessfully, but doubtless his biggest and least-understood impact was on health care in Wisconsin. Back in the early 1970s, Milwaukee business leaders were pushing for state funding of the fledging Medical College of Wisconsin. Then-Gov. Patrick Lucey, who ran against Carley in the 1966 primary and was looking for ways to make him a loyalist, appointed Carley to head up a state task force on medical education. The task force supported funding MCW (something its competitor, the UW Medical School, opposed). Carley soon was tapped (in 1974) to become MCW president and raised $17.6 million (then the largest private fund drive in state history) to help support the school.
Carley was also decisive in assuring that Froedtert Hospital was built next door to MCW. The hospital was not needed; at the time, Milwaukee had an oversupply of hospitals. In those days, any new hospitals had be approved by the State Division of Health, and Ralph Andreano, the division head, would not approve it. So Carley pulled strings. “I went back to the man [Lucey] who put me there [at MCW] and reminded him of that,” Carley gleefully told me in a story I co-wrote years ago. “Lucey was Andreano’s boss. He was helpful.” Andreano had to get out of the way.
The building of both MCW and Froedtert out at county grounds was decisive in creating a medical school at the county grounds in Wauwatosa, rather than in the Downtown area, where there was a huge infrastructure of already-existing hospitals. It helped drive the Downtown hospitals out of business, hurt the central city, and made medical care less accessible to poor people. It also made medical care far more expensive, as hospitals like Froedtert built in charges on patient bills that help fund MCW.
On the other hand, as a Milwaukee Magazine story has reported, the Medical College has grown into a huge success. In a city that is still research-poor, it brings in $130 million in research grants, has registered more than 50 patents and helped spin off more than a dozen companies. There’s no doubt it’s an asset for Milwaukee, but it has come at quite a cost. And none of this would have been possible without David Carley.
The Buzz:
-The Pettit Foundation, by the way, has about $30 million. It gained about $6 million or so after the Milwaukee Brewers were sold to Mark Attanasio. Jane Pettit was a minor stockholder.
-More from the public meeting where the plan for the UW-Milwaukee School of Freshwater Sciences was discussed: I’m told philanthropist Michael Cudahy suggested the new facility should be called the World Water Center. He also suggested the new building could rival the Louvre.
-Activist Greg Bird wrote me to suggest another site where the Freshwater School might be built: the Grand Trunk Yards, east and north of Barnacle Bud’s at the north end of Hilbert Street. “It has the best remnant of wetlands, including some possible unfilled original soils, in Milwaukee’s estuary. If the wetlands could be restored and expanded, it would be a prototype for what needs to be done around the Great Lakes shore,” Bird suggests.
-And the Sports Nut offers the latest developments regarding the Satan of pro football, Brett Favre.
