The struggle for the future of the Milwaukee County Courthouse annex —the parking structure which hangs over a portion of the Marquette Interchange and features a painting of a whale on the side — is nearing a deadline for completion.
Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker recommends that the annex — which is scheduled to cost the county roughly $6.5 million in upkeep over the next three years — be demolished after an independent consultant told the county that a single instance of concrete falling onto a passing car in the northbound lanes of Interstate 43 could cost the county more than the substantial cost of upkeep and repair. This is only the most recent in a string of correspondence to the county board, dating back to early December.
Wisconsin Department of Transportation officials told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that the potential to integrate the demolition into the current Marquette Interchange repairs is "difficult but not impossible."
The courthouse parking annex needs to go, both because of the emergency costs of maintaining the building and because the annex is, well, ugly. The alternatives being proposed by Walker's office appear feasible on the surface, but one item in particular caught our attention.
Marquette University, according to county documents provided by Walker's office, has "signaled its willingness" to potentially accommodate the county's need for parking in the event that the annex was destroyed. Before students and faculty who struggle daily to accommodate their parking needs prepare to mob the administration offices with a litany of complaints and protests, it should be noted that the Marquette option is one of options that the executive's office has suggested for the county board.
On the one hand, this would perhaps go some way toward improving community relations with the surrounding area; Marquette would be acting in an ability to provide a service for the county board. This means being a good neighbor to the county in a time of need, according to Vice President of University Advancement Toby Peters.
Additionally, a representative from Walker's office didn't rule out the possibility that any alternative would result in state and federal highway funds being directed to the task in order to minimize the effect on the county's budget. This would mean that funding from these sources could potentially be directed to Marquette to help mediate the costs of providing this service to the community. One suggestion for the state and federal funds that could result would be to build a parking structure across from the Al McGuire center, behind the 1212 Building.
However, as the parking configuration currently stands, if 447 spaces of overflow parking that now reside in the courthouse annex were to be directed to the university, the result would be slightly less than mass anarchy in the parking structures and street locations surrounding Marquette. While a new parking structure has been added to the university's parking resources in the last year, accommodating the newcomers from 447 suddenly nonexistent parking spaces would push the already crowded parking conditions to the brink of overload. The university, of course, could handle a portion of those new cars on and near campus.
As such, while we support Walker's initiative to take out the eyesore and potentially dangerous annex, we can't support at least one of the alternatives. The other alternatives in the plan seem to make more sense, but a resolution suggesting that a parking structure using the funds is built on an existing county lot at North 6th and West State streets has stalled in the county board meetings since its proposal. The more alternatives that are eliminated besides the Marquette option, the closer those 447 parking spaces come to swamping Marquette's crowded parking universe.
This article appeared in The Marquette Tribune on April 12 2005.
