County public works committee moves to help the OVTC

The Oneida County board’s public works committee at its Oct. 2 meeting forwarded to the county’s land information department a request from the Oneida Vilas Transit Commission (OVTC) regarding the use of four acres of county-owned property in the town of Pelican.

The OVTC has been for some time now looking for a new home for Northwoods Transit Connections (NTC), the public transportation partnership the two counties operate that has its facilities along State Highway 47 in Rhinelander. 

Currently, those facilities are leased annually by the OVTC for $1,700 per month. 

NTC manager Barb Newman said much of the grant funding to help fund the project is lined up and now, it’s a matter of finding a location to build the new facility. 

In June, OVTC chairman Marv Anderson sent a letter to Rhinelander mayor Kris Hanus that served as an “intent to buy” city property near the Wisconsin Department of Motor Vehicles offices that would be the site for the OVTC’s new administration, bus maintenance, and storage buildings. 

At its July 14 meeting, the city council voted unanimously following a closed session not to sell the property to the OVTC. 

Since then, Newman said she met with Oneida County land information department head Sara Chiamulera in late September and asked about the county property on Lake Julia Road in Pelican. 

“With that, it looks like at one point the highway department wanted to build there or still wants to build there,” she said. 

The OVTC’s interest in the property in Pelican was on the agenda for the Oct. 2 meeting of the public works committee and Newman attended.

“I don’t know if they’re going to build there or not but there is space for both of us to be there and they believe we both can be there,” Newman said.

She said it was her understanding the matter regarding the four acres for the OVTC would be on the agenda for the Oct. 14 meeting of the county board’s land records committee for consideration there. 

“We’re hopeful that we can continue with this parcel of land,” she said. 

Oneida County supervisor Ted Cushing, chairman of the public works committee, said of the 37.5 acres the county owns in that part of Pelican “there’s quite a bit of acreage over there.”

“The motion by the (public works) committee was to forward this to the land information office and start the process by paying for a surveyor to split it off because that has to be done and it’ll take awhile to get all this accomplished but it leaves plenty of room if we decide to move the highway shop,” Cushing said and clarified at this time, Oneida County isn’t looking to re-locate the county highway shop from its Kemp Street location in Rhinelander but he said a land study of the current site at Kemp Street has been authorized “to see if there’s room for the improvements that we need.”

However the county’s highway shop issue ultimately turns out, Cushing said the county’s Julia Lake Road location in Pelican “would be a good location for” NTC.

“The county already owns it,” he said. “Now, it’s just a matter of the logistics of surveying.” 

Brian Jopek may be reached via email at [email protected].