The Madison Common Council passed their 2023 budget last night, providing the funding needed to open the Madison Public Market, expanding the CARES program, and a small pay bump to city alders.
But in public comment this week, south-west side residents took the city’s engineering division to task over funding for a greenway restoration project.
The Sauk Creek Greenway is an approximately mile long waterway around Old Sauk Road that directs stormwater downstream.
Hannah Mohelnitzky with the city’s engineering division says stormwater mitigation is the main function of any greenway.
“Greenways are just one of many options that we have, we could have a retention pond, or a greenway,” Mohelnitzky says. “Obviously there are so many other options out there but truly, when we have a greenway, and it’s eroding, we want to make sure we are maintaining it, because it is more of a form of green infrastructure and helps mitigate the stormwater though that area.”
The Sauk Creek Greenway has been there for decades, and when neighborhoods began popping up around it in the 70s, it was an incentive for new homeowners. However, the wooded area has seen its fair share of challenges over the past few years.
Erosion is causing sediment to wash into nearby Wexford pond, which now requires dredging due to the eroded sediment. And, erosion has caused the trees surrounding the greenway to fall into the water, causing new water channels to form and catalyzing even more erosion.
In 2018, the city began planning for a renovation of the Sauk Creek Greenway, hiring Tree Health Management, an arborist consultancy group, to conduct a survey of trees in the greenway.
They found that, of the over 5,500 trees surveyed, 40% were invasive Buckthorn and Box Elder trees. These and other “low quality” trees are preventing new tree growth, and creating stream blockages that backs up the flow of stormwater. The overcrowding of shrubs and trees is preventing sunshine from reaching the ground – leaving the groundlayer mostly composed of bare, exposed soil.
The consultants determined that, under current conditions, the “high quality” native oaks in the greenway- the youngest of which are 80 to 100 years old – will die off without being replaced.
But before the city could formulate a plan on what to do with that information, Madison experienced historic floods, and the project was placed on hold.
Now, the city is working to restart the process of developing a plan, and have included $3.2 million dollars in the 2023 capital budget to fund consultants and staff time to draft a plan.
Neighbors have been wary of what the city has in store.
The Friends of Sauk Creek is a community group of neighbors to the greenway who are opposed to the city intervening. Over the last 2 months, the group gathered around 350 signatures for a petition calling for environmentally friendly stormwater improvements be made to the Sauk Creek Greenway with full public disclosure and input.
Gwen Long is a member of the Friends of Sauk Creek. Going off of information from the city’s website on the 2018 survey and consultant report, she believes that a major reworking of the greenway would be heavy-handed.
“It does have some maintenance issues that we do want done, but the plan to dredge the creek twice as deep and then grade the banks out 30-40 feet on both sides and take a lot of the trees out, which was their plan in 2018… Removing trees from an about 80 foot swath along the creek and putting in a bike path was really not acceptable for the environment, for the wildlife, for the neighborhood, for the community, it was just not a good plan at all.”
Mohelnitzky, of the Engineering Division, says that’s not the current plan, because there is no current plan. Once the floods hit in 2018, the city temporarily shelved the project, and as of today doesn’t even have a preliminary plan to present to the public. That, Mohelnitzky says, is why they haven’t requested public feedback on the project yet.
“We do have the conversations with the community, we want to hear the feedback, but right now, because there was all this information that was started in 2018, and some time (has passed) in between, our community has been waiting for answers,” Mohelnitzky says. “We are working towards that. We have funding secured in the budget and now, in 2023, we will be able to kick off our public engagement once we have something to chew on. We are going to revisit all of the work that’s already been started, and then present an official proposed preliminary design in the spring.”
Some residents say there’s a lack of trust with the engineering division – a repeated theme during public input on the budget this week.
They point to the greenway restoration on Tree Lane, about a mile from the Sauk Creek Greenway, where almost all the trees were removed.
Mohelnitzky says that, while they don’t have any specific number for how many trees will be removed from Sauk Creek, the two areas are vastly different. She says the trees involved in Tree Lane were invasive and aggressive species that were both not conducive to stormwater management and bad for native habitat. Sauk Creek, meanwhile, has more native, “high quality” tree species, meaning that, again, while they don’t have any specifics, they intend to leave as many trees as they can.
Another issue raised by the Friends of Sauk Creek is the funding itself. Gwen Long asks why the engineering division needs $3.2 million without even knowing what the project would look like.
“They don’t even have a plan,” Long says. “How can they provide money for something they say they don’t even have a plan for? We found out that they sent this out last year and got $1.3 million approved last year without us even realizing what’s going on. So when they say that they’re going to be transparent, and they want community input, and they’re going to come out to us and talk to us, they haven’t.”
But Mohelnitzky says, that’s just all part of the process.
“Prior to the public engagement process, there is a lot of work that needs to be done in order to get to the preliminary design, in order to present that,” Mohelnitzky says. “The preliminary designs don’t just pop up out of nowhere, there’s a lot of data gathering, we are out in the community, we are already hearing from community members, there is a lot staff time for calculations on the water flow and trying to put something together that is environmentally friendly and a good base for our community.”
Ultimately, Mohelnitzky is asking for the neighbors to be patient.
“We are sharing everything that we can, so stay connected to the project page,” Mohelnitzky says. “Join us when we announce and schedule our public information meetings, stay engaged, keep an open mind, read up on (the information) that we have out there, we have a lot of really good information out there, including the difference between this and Tree Lane. Hopefully, we’ve provided quite a few questions and answers for people from what we’ve heard so far (and) we are trying to share as much as we can. We have a lot of educational resources, like story maps that specifically zero in on the tree survey that we did, or the certified arborist did (in 2018).”
Last night, the council passed the $3.2 million to restart the project, on the last day of budget negotiations. Mohelnitzky says that the engineering division will begin meeting with neighbors of the greenway in the spring after they have drafted a preliminary plan. Public engagement on the project is expected to take the bulk of 2023, with construction not beginning until at least 2024.
Photo courtesy: City of Madison Engineering
