PHOTO: Courtesy of WLUK
GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — Now that an agreement has been reached for the future of the Green Bay coal piles, the follow up question is, what’s next?
For 125 years, coal has sat on the west side bank of the Fox River. While it won’t take 125 years to get rid of it, redevelopment of the site won’t happen overnight.
“It could be three to five years before you visibly see a difference on this site, but all of the pieces are falling into place to allow that to happen,” said Green Bay City Council member Brian Johnson.
Under the agreement reached by Brown County and C. Reiss, the company that owns the coal piles, a new port will need to be engineered and built on the former Pulliam Power Plant property to accommodate the salt product that will be housed there. Then, it will take about two years for the coal at the downtown site to be spent down.
And after a century of housing the coal, it’s unclear what environmental elements will be uncovered before any redevelopment can begin.
While coal isn’t the hardest product to clean up, the site will need to be tested and remediation work must be completed before anything new can be built on the site.
According to Johnson, “We’ll have to work out the site plan and figure out where exactly the line of demarcation is for the 10 acres of developable land, and then we’ll start having some conversations down the road around testing, to understand what truly is in that site and what it’s going to take to remediate it.”
A lot can change over the next five years — which is why no one involved can say for sure what kind of development, other than mixed-use, will eventually go on the site. C. Reiss and the city are planning to work together on finding the right fit for both the community, and the company as the developer.
“It will be a new development for us. The city is going to be helping us, probably be looking to any other government agency that can help us. We’ll be looking for developers, so if anyone kind of has ideas on what we want to do at Mason Street, we’re open to it,” said C. Reiss Coal CEO Keith Haselhoff.
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