The university proposes to build a new 14-foot-wide service road through the Bill’s Woods portion of the UW Lakeshore Nature Preserve to provide heavy trucks and other vehicles access to the campus maintenance yard north of Bill’s Woods and southeast of the Eagle Heights Community Gardens.  

As noted in the Draft Environmental Impact Assessment, “The project site also resides entirely within the Lakeshore Nature Preserve.…”  However, the same DEIA also states, “This facility (the Lakeshore Nature Preserve)  is directly adjacent to the project site on the south side and is located on a different parcel.”  Both statements cannot be true;  the former statement is true, and this proposed service road will be carved 100% from the Lakeshore Nature Preserve.

The new roadway will run parallel to and immediately south of the current crushed-gravel road that serves the Eagle Heights Community Gardens. Relocating the service road – currently running through the Stone Gate entry and along the eastern edge of Bill’s Woods – would reduce pedestrian-vehicle conflicts in that vicinity. However, it will simply relocate the same safety concerns to a new location with high visitation from Eagle Heights residents and Eagle Heights Community Garden members. 

The new roadway will be at least 14 feet wide, but nowhere in the report is the length of the road quantified.  Based on the maps provided in the DEIS (Exhibit A; Appendix C Soil Map), the road will run through from 400 linear feet to 600 linear feet of forested parts of Bill’s Woods, plus another approximately 100 to 200  feet of the grassy approach to the berm on the north edge of the campus maintenance yard.  In any event, the DEIS states in Section IV (A) that the project area exceeds one acre (43,560 sq ft).  However one measures it, this new roadway means a significant swath of Bill’s Woods will be destroyed, amounting to at least 5,600 sq feet (14’ width x 400’ road length) to as much as 8,400 sq ft of forested land.  Mature trees including walnuts, hickories, oaks, catalpa, maples and others will likely be bulldozed.  We can’t determine the count of eliminated trees for certain because the precise borderlines of the new roadway have not been made public. 

The new roadway will also mean at least 5,600 sq ft of new, rather impermeable road surface, and the increased runoff from this roadway has the potential to exacerbate the erosion chronically damaging Bill’s Woods downhill from the current roadway. 

Building a 400-to-800-foot-long, 14 foot roadway through the UW Lakeshore Nature Preserve will scar the forest ecosystem and cut the size of the natural area of the Lakeshore Nature Preserve. 

All of this ultimately calls into question the university’s pledges to protect the Preserve as part of the campus’s strategies for advancing sustainability as a leading university goal – given that other options exist.  

The Friends of Lakeshore Nature Preserve strongly recommends the option laid out in multiple Master Plans the University has invested in:

The latest master plan for the Lakeshore Nature Preserve calls for the removal of the campus maintenance yard from the Preserve (2023 Lakeshore Nature Preserve Master Plan Update, page 44). The 2022 Willow Creek Master Plan – Advanced Planning Report calls for the removal of the campus maintenance yard from the Lakeshore Nature Preserve (page 16). And the university announced in February 2024 the gift from Jerry Frautschi to support the Lakeshore Nature Preserve Frautschi Center.  And we note the university by spring 2024 selected the site just outside and to the south of the Stone Gate Entry for the location of the Frautschi Center. This site will preclude heavy trucks from using the roadway through the Stone Gate to the campus maintenance yard. Thus nearly 2.5 years have passed since the time it became clear that the university had two options: move the campus maintenance yard out of the Lakeshore Nature Preserve to another site on campus as master planned, or sacrifice a swath of Bill’s Woods for the new roadway.  

Building this roadway through the Lakeshore Nature Preserve when other options are available, and when the university’s master plans have called for the removal of the maintenance yard from the Preserve, will have significant social effects of alienating many of the most dedicated supporters of the Preserve who have long helped to steward and sustain the Preserve.  One need only look back 25 years to the origin story of the Preserve as an entity distinct from the UW Arboretum to estimate the fervor that can be anticipated when people see the scope and scale of the damage to Bill’s Woods that this project portends.  

Therefore we call on the university to solve multiple problems with one decision: take this once-in-a-generation opportunity to enhance and advance the Lakeshore Nature Preserve by moving the campus maintenance yard for all the reasons given in the plans above and preclude the destruction of a 14-foot-wide by (at least) 400-foot-long swath of Bill’s Wood while providing for the safety of users of the current community gardens access road.

To Members of the University Committee,

At the request of the Board of Directors of the Friends of the Lakeshore Nature Preserve, a 501c3 organization dedicated to supporting the UW-Madison Lakeshore Nature Preserve, I write to share with you our concerns regarding the proposal to bulldoze a new, 14-foot-wide road through at least 400 feet of the Preserve running along the north edge of the portion of the Preserve known as Bill’s Woods.  This road will be parallel to the current road that serves the Eagle Heights Community Gardens.

Originally many of us were under the impression that the new access road referred to upgrading and strengthening the current road, to give UW dump trucks and other heavy vehicles access to the campus maintenance yard that lies north of Bills Woods and southeast of the Eagle Heights Community Garden.   This access is needed for two reasons:  1.  the university chooses to continue to keep the campus maintenance yard in the Lakeshore Nature Preserve; and 2. the current access road through the Stone Gate Entry will no longer be available to big trucks once the new Frautschi Center is built at the Stone Gate Entry.

However, only recently with the publication of the Draft Environmental Impact Assessment released on June 12 by Ayres Associates did the actual scope of the construction come into clear view:  this will be a totally new road, 14 feet wide, of unquantified length but by my estimate close to 600 feet long, to be carved out of Bill’s Woods. 

We note that the Environmental Impact Plan for the Frautschi Center included a detailed analysis of the pros and cons of the four sites considered for the Center, and a justification for the site that was selected.

In contrast, the Draft Environmental Impact Assessment of this proposed access road merely mentions that the possibilities of moving the campus maintenance yard to other sites on campus were considered but no other sites were found to be adequate.  There is no list of the other sites considered, and no discussion of the analysis of the costs and benefits of the various options. 

Thus the current plan is for the university to spend $400,000 of donor money to carve a new road through Bill’s Woods, without any public explanation as to why the university is choosing not to move the maintenance yard to another location, as recommended by the 2023 Lakeshore Nature Preserve Master Plan Update (page 44) and by the 2022 Willow Creek Master Plan – Advanced Planning Report (page 16).

We are also aware of a person who is willing to donate $1 million to help defray costs of moving the maintenance yard from the Preserve. By adding in the $400,000 slated for the new road and instead putting that money towards removing the yard, this means the university now has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to affirm its commitments to sustainability through its stewardship of the Preserve, and thereby advance the Preserve’s academic missions in instruction, research and outreach.

I am pleased to inform you of our concerns about this situation and I would be happy to respond to any questions or suggestions you may have.

Sincerely,
Tom Zinnen
President, Board of Directors
Friends of the Lakeshore Nature Preserve

Dear Friends of the Lakeshore Nature Preserve,

I strongly support the on-going efforts to relocate the Grounds Storage Area in the Lakeshore Nature Preserve to the old Barley Malt Lab site on Walnut Street or elsewhere out of the Preserve. The Walnut St relocation was identified in the UW Lakeshore Nature Preserve Master Plan (2023), the Willow Creek Advanced Planning Study (2022), and the 2015 Campus Master Plan that were all reviewed and approved by the Campus Planning Committee, a shared governance committee charged with oversight of facilities planning & development on campus. All of these plans were also reviewed/approved by the Joint Campus Area Committee, a joint neighborhood, city of Madison, UW-Madison committee. Further the university’s Design Review Board reviewed/approved all of these planning documents that show the Grounds Storage area relocated out of the Preserve.

As you know, I served as the inaugural director of the Lakeshore Nature Preserve from 2010 to 2023 when I retired from the university after 38 years of UW service. I also served as the Director of Campus Planning & Landscape Architecture for over 20 years at UW-Madison, facilitating three comprehensive facilities development plans for the university. During that period, the Grounds Storage/Service Yard was a consistent safety issue for users of the Preserve and was more of an “out of sight, out of mind” space that continued to create noise and dangerous activity impacts to Preserve users. We often heard of many near miss safety issues with Grounds vehicles driving quickly through the Preserve with their large, oversized vehicles trying to mix in with pedestrians, many who had to step off the paths to get out of the way of speeding Grounds’ staff vehicles.

When I retired, the approved plan was to move the Grounds activities out of the Preserve to the old Barley Malt Lab site on the east side of Walnut Street, south of the Walnut Street Heating Plant. A full site plan was developed and included in the Willow Creek Advance Planning document for implementation when funds became available. My understanding is the funding (up to $2M) is now available, yet FP&M leadership continues to balk at those funds and support leaving the dangerous and disruptive Grounds activities in the Preserve and immediately adjacent to the Eagle Heights Community Gardens, using $400,000 of gift funds set aside for the new UW Lakeshore Nature Preserve’s Frautschi Center. I’m sure Jerry Frautschi would be non-too pleased with the use of these gift funds on a new, dangerous road through the Preserve, a space that he and his family have cherished for decades.

These two projects are NOT tied together, and the “new road” project should not hold the Frautschi Center hostage. The Center should have started construction long ago and the Grounds Storage site should have long been relocated to the vacant site on Walnut Street years ago, even prior to the Center even being discussed. My current understanding is the university has removed the proposed new access road from the Frautschi Center bid documents which means it will be a separate project on its own timeline. 

I cannot emphasize enough that this new roadway, through sensitive Lakeshore Nature Preserve lands, is not a temporary or long-term solution to eliminating a long-held safety issue. I have seen documents going back to well before 2000 when I joined UW-Madison staff that clearly define the safety issue and was a long-term issue for my predecessors that simple never got addressed due to funding concerns. 

I also know that cremains have been scattered in and on a berm area near the Grounds site in the Preserve, something that had been on-going prior to 1998. My understanding that space will be impacted by the proposed new roadway into the Preserve. It is a direct violation of state law and the Wisconsin Historical Society Burial Sites Program. The new road will create runoff that will impact a prehistoric archaeological site, officially designated by the WHS as 47-DA-413, an ancient prehistoric campsite and village.

The university cannot let this road project move forward. The Grounds staging area needs to be, once and for all, relocated out of the Preserve and to the designated site on Walnut Street or elsewhere out of the Preserve.

Thanks,
Gary Brown, PLA, FASLA
Director Emeritus
FP&M Campus Planning & Landscape Architecture