Downtown Greendale Improvements Could Come in Many Shapes, Sizes

Would you like to see a hotel in downtown Greendale? How about an amphitheater? A family park with a fountain like that at Bay Shore Mall?

All three of those ideas were among the more than two dozen discussed, analyzed and ranked by a 17-member Village Center ad hoc committee tasked at collecting ideas to improve Downtown Greendale.

The committee, which was formed last August and has been bouncing ideas off one another for more than eight months, presented its final report to the Village Board of Trustees on Tuesday.

Included were 26 ideas that at least some committee members thought could improve downtown. Those that seemed to have the most support from the committee were rerouting Greendale Middle School traffic patterns, hiring a marketing director that focuses on improving the Village Center, a family park with water fountain and interior renovations of the hose tower, a project already being tackled by the Historical Society.

“I wouldn’t say any of them were outside the scope,” of what the committee set out to do, Village Manager Todd Michaels said. “They might push it, but the idea was, ‘What are concepts that will benefit downtown?’

“One that people asked about was marketing. An idea was that someone, somewhere, somehow should be marketing downtown. Was that really something they should be talking about? They were given the task of finding what will benefit downtown and that’s one of the things they thought would benefit it.”

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The committee largely agreed that the municipal parking lot was a necessity for the Village and should not be used for development. The committee, however, was mostly divided on what to do with the former police and fire building, which has stood vacant for more than a decade.

One idea proposed by the committee was to turn that building into ruins, paying respect to the building’s history with plaques and original brickwork, but using other portions of the space for picnic tables or other similar ideas. One committee member suggested using one of the building’s walls to form an amphitheater.

Now that there are more than two-dozen ideas to be considered, the task now is for Village officials to sift through them and find out what makes the most sense to pursue. The ad hoc committee’s findings were referred to both the Community Development Authority and a joint meeting of the committee of the whole and the plan commission.

But there is no firm timeline for any project to move forward, so don’t expect major changes any time soon.

“These are broad concepts,” Michaels said. “If it’s going to involve construction, we’d have to make a plan, see what kind of an affect it would have on a number of things before it would get anywhere. One thing people need to remember, whatever comes out of this, or at least any of the brick and mortar concepts, it’s going to have to go through the plan commission, a public hearing process.”