1/4/2009 6:00:00 AM There's hope yet for Stewart's Woods School district gets involved with attempt to buy forest
Though it’s not environmentally protected “virgin” forest, the dense forest inside the bypass known as Stewart’s Woods could become a Verona Area School District nature learning area, as well as a public recreation area. VASD is looking into helping the city purchase it.
For anyone who hoped to see a dense forest in Verona stay in public hands, there is a sliver of light emerging through the dark woods.
The Verona Area School District is working with the city on a purchase agreement for Stewart's Woods, an old forest located just inside the 18-151 bypass on the southwest edge of the city. If it works out, the district would pay half or more of the state's asking price and would get 20 acres of eventually developable land and 33 acres of woods that would be designated both a city/county park and a school forest.
But it's the equivalent of a four-team trade in pro sports, with all the complexity and intrigue and just as much chance of it all falling apart. And it's on a tight deadline, too, requiring the application of two grants that were originally set to expire at the end of 2008.
"A lot of stars will need to align to make this work," city administrator Shawn Murphy said.
VASD superintendent Dean Gorrell agreed, saying it will come down to how much the state's Department of Administration, which is coordinating the sale, is willing to come down from its original $2.4 million price tag.
"It really is going to depend on how badly the DOA wants to get rid of its excess land," he said.
Discussions with the DOA's portfolio manager suggested to city administrator Shawn Murphy that the agency might be willing to work with the city on a much lower price than its initial offering. That means the clock is ticking on a deal, which would need to be made in the next two or three weeks.
"While the benefits to the public are considerable if this joint purchase were realized, we are cognizant that it must work financially for everyone involved," Murphy and Gorrell wrote to the DOA last month in a plea to drop its asking price closer to what the city had appraised it for, $536,000.
The DOA would have to justify the price to taxpayers through the state Building Commission, and while it wouldn't necessarily have to squeeze every penny it could out of a fellow government agency, it can't just give the land away, either, or offer it at far below market value.
But market value is a tricky thing, particularly in 2009, and particularly with this land.
The biggest reason for the huge disparity in the two figures - which both were arrived at in 2007 - is public access. At the moment, there is none, with the property bordered on two sides by farmland and on the rest by the highway, and the city's appraisal factored that heavily, Murphy said.
But with a road planned - and officially mapped - to someday connect Westridge Parkway and Paoli Street through the West End and the adjacent Erbach farm, the state's appraisers saw the development potential high.
The problem is the road - a four-lane divided highway crossing a flood plain - would cost about $2.6 million even if it the city didn't have to figure out a way over, under or through the Military Ridge State Trail, which likely would be with an expensive overpass. That's one reason the city has argued that such a huge outlay drops the value of the land, especially since a large portion of that cost will end up being assessed to it.
And the owner of that land would be on the hook for more than a quarter of the cost of the road. Though it would be four lanes mainly because of the expected traffic boost from the West End and any development to the east - which would trigger its construction - the developer's agreement the city worked out with West End developer T. Wall Properties slices the share of the pie based on area rather than traffic generation, city engineer Bob Gundlach said.
That's years down the road - perhaps even a decade or more - but so is anything the school district would build, except for possibly the multidistrict Global Academy, which is targeted for a Fall 2010 opening and currently under an exclusive-rights contract with David Reinke to locate on the southeast side of the city.
"This might present a backup to that," Gorrell said. "We'd have to find a temporary place for it (if so). The Reinke property still represents the best spot for the consortium."
More likely, VASD could build athletic fields to allow a high school expansion, a 4-year-old kindergarten or something outside-of-the-box like that. It wouldn't be an ideal site for a regular school, Gorrell said.
"It's not likely that it would become a site for a traditional middle school or elementary school because there really wouldn't be walkers to it," he said. "It would not represent a neighborhood. And it's not big enough for a high school."
If none of those options works out, it could sell off the non-forested land, even though that couldn't be the initial plan.
"You can't go in there and purchase purely on speculation," Gorrell cautioned. "That's not to say that you can't purchase land with the intention of constructing a school facility or school facilities on it (and end up selling it as surplus)."
The reason it is being sold in the first place is because the DOT bought the land in the early 1990s to make way for the bypass, and it recently was declared "surplus" and prepared it for sale. Almost two years ago the city approved redrawing the parcel to leave a small amount of right-of-way for a theoretical expansion of the highway and split it off from the rest so the DOA could put the big piece on the market.
It was offered to any public entities before being put on the market, and immediately the city's Parks and Urban Forestry Commission and the Town of Verona's Open Space and Parks Commission began looking for ways to keep the land from being sold on the open market.
They explored all funding avenues they could think of, from gathering a coalition of interested parties, such as the National Heritage Land Trust and the National Conservancy, to buying it and selling off the farmland for development. But available money was limited and the price tag was well beyond what anyone could pony up.
Eventually, city Parks director Dave Walker got access to a $168,400 grant from the DNR's Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund and an agreement from Dane County's Conservation Fund to pay up to 25 percent of the cost, but even that still left too big of a hole for the city to fund for what would amount to a park.
The city seemed resigned to letting the grant expire and letting it go on the open market before VASD began looking for land as part of the space needs survey it completed last spring and opened discussions on a four-way deal. While its most pressing need for space, the Global Academy, seems a long shot now, the land became more intriguing the longer the district looked at it.
"I can't speak to the species that would be contained within that woods, but the sheer size of it would be a bonus (over the current 13-acre school forest)," Gorrell said. "The Madison School District has an enormous forest (in the Town of Verona). There could be an opportunity to do some expanded things (like Madison does) ... such as a high ropes course and team-building activities."
If that's to happen, the city and school district are looking to make an offer on the land by mid-January and close this spring. That quick timeline is one thing in Verona's favor, as any interested developer likely would have to spend months investigating the value and potential of the property.
Being in the city's urban service area makes it easier to develop, but having a floodplain next to it makes it more difficult. The forest could be used for a housing development, the farmland would be good for commercial uses, but roadway access is a long way off, and developers often shy away from holding land for that long.
But the city already knows what the land could be, as the Parks Commission has had it on the radar for a few years.
"I would like to see it become a conservancy," Walker said. "We'd put some trails in it, remove some of the undergrowth, open it up a little bit."
