September 21, 2015 at 4:57 p.m.
With no water source, planning committee sends proposal back
It's back to square one for Minocqua water plant investors
With no water source, planning committee sends proposal back
Up until a few days before Thursday's meeting in Minocqua there was a plan to truck water from a well at Presque Isle's Carlin Club to a Minocqua warehouse.
Inside the 24,000-square foot warehouse would be storage tanks for that water and an automated stretch blow molding machines that would make bottles for the water out of "plastic slugs," as Minocqua businessman Bob Rynders explained when he first presented the plans to the Minocqua plan commission in early August.
The building would be built on Rynders' business property on the north side of State Highway 70 west of Minocqua. The business partnership, known as EJR5 LLC, would include Rynders, his son Ed and Trig Solberg.
Steve Kosnick of Fitchburg, owner of the Carlin Club for the last six years, was also identified at Thursday's meeting as another investor in the project.
Rynders in August told the planning commission and later the Minocqua town board there would be a possibility of up to 10 full-time, year-round jobs to start with one shift.
If things went well and there were other shifts added. As many as 18 or 20 jobs created, Rynders said. Noise, Rynders said, would be at a minimum as most of the operation would be self-contained. Also, because of the nature of the bottle-making process, there would be very little, if any, wastewater or excess plastic.
If there were, it would be recycled.
Truck traffic would be minimal, maybe two trucks per shift, Rynders added.
The proposal met the favor of the Minocqua plan commission.
That panel forwarded the conditional use permit application to the town board where it was approved.
By the time the Aug. 18 town board meeting took place, however, several residents of Minocqua's Hill Lake neighborhood, located near Rynders' property where the warehouse would be built, had expressed a number of concerns.
Among their concerns - the way the application was filled out, the possibility the water level of underground aquifers would be affected, what the bottle-making process would entail and what would happen if the plant didn't have product from the well in Presque Isle.
Rynders has since clarified the bottle-making process would be stretch blow molding.
Since the town board meeting, several people have written letters to The Lakeland Times expressing their opposition to the idea of establishing a water bottling plant in Minocqua using Presque Isle water.
Some of the Hill Lake residents reiterated their concerns about what would happen if the water source for the plant didn't materialize, that concern being that their lake would become the source for the plant's product.
It was because of that concern that one of the conditions placed on the project by the town of Minocqua was that the water not come from the Minocqua area.
But opponents also pointed to something called the Great Lakes Compact.
At the August plan commission and town board meetings, Rynders said the well was part of the Lake Superior watershed.
Removal of water from that watershed is, for the most part, prohibited by the Great Lakes Compact, also known as the Great Lakes - St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact.
The compact, a legally binding interstate compact that includes Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania, became federal law in December 2008.
Over the course of the few days before Thursday's meeting of the zoning committee, Solberg pulled the Carlin Club's well out of consideration as the source of product for the new Minocqua water bottling plant.
'It should go back to the town'
Several of the residents of the Hill Lake Association were in attendance Thursday as were a few residents of Presque Isle.
Jim Luedtke, a representative for Kosnick, answered questions about the bottle-making process and the project itself.
While some audience members expressed appreciation for Luedtke's candor in answering questions, others expressed their belief that the property, zoned as business, was improperly zoned since the project had been described as a manufacturing process.
But there was an even greater cause for concern on their part, that concern being the recent removal by Solberg of the Carlin Club well water as the source for the plant's product.
Because it tied into one of the conditions of the CUP, it became a concern for others as well.
Committee member Billy Fried, also a Minocqua town supervisor, said the town board had approved the CUP with the understanding the water source would be "coming from a specific place."
"For me who sits on the town board, it changes for me if the water source is coming from somewhere other than what was presented at the time to the town," he said. "I don't know if it does for the other town board members."
Committee member Jack Sorenson asked Fried if he wanted the committee to send the matter back to the town board for further consideration.
"I would think if the water source is different than what was identified at the town level it should go back to the town, yes," Fried replied.
His comments were met with applause from several in the audience.
Committee chairman Scott Holewinski opened the floor for public comment and Mark Hartzheim, the chairman of the town of Minocqua, spoke up.
"The town put seven conditions on this [CUP application] out of its own concerns, the plan commission's concerns and additional concerns raised by the public," he said. "I would say for sure two of those have not been met and possibly you could argue even more, but clearly two have not been met."
"In the town concerns?" Holewinski asked.
"In the town concerns," Hartzheim said.
One of the items, he said, was that a letter would be received by the town from the bottle-making manufacturer regarding any wastewater in the bottle-making process.
"We were told verbally here, but not by an equipment manager but by others, that there is no wastewater," Hartzheim said. "That was one of things at our meeting ... we want to hear from the manufacturer, we want to see a letter from the manufacturer and not something second- or third-hand. It could very well match what the gentleman told us. Trust but verify, I guess, is the phrase."
"It's one of those things no one wants in their backyard, but we're OK with them being in other communities," Hartzheim added. "This is our community so we have to pay attention and now that we know the remote well [at Presque Isle] is not in play anymore, we have a whole different level of concern and I think it changes everything,"
Brian Jopek may be reached via email at [email protected].
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