Price: Is UWM’s Innovation Campus on life support?

“The Milwaukee Regional Medical Center is an economic engine for the region, and the new UWM School of Engineering will be like pouring jet fuel into that engine. ... This is a key part of our Blueprint for Economic Prosperity.”

— Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker, May 2009

When great dreams and grand schemes die, they go sometimes with a bang and clatter, more often with a prolonged hisssss as the air leaks out. But the impending death of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Innovation Campus has been attended with only an embarrassed silence.

Remember how high the sky was just seven years ago, when the $143 million plan, its centerpiece a multi-million-dollar, 150,000-square-foot UWM Integrated Research Center, was etched into the public consciousness? Innovation Campus was to be the keystone of a mighty arch of technology that would attract world-class academic researchers to collaborate with Milwaukee Regional Medical Center institutions and Milwaukee County Research Park corporations, there to develop tomorrow’s wonders in biomedical engineering and advanced industrial controls.

CHAT:Join us at 11 a.m. Tuesday, Feb. 21, to talk about the UWM Innovation Campus

GILBERT: UWM’s Innovation Campus is flourishing

It would be a 21st century re-imagining of the County Grounds, where the public, private and non-profit sectors would intersect to thrust Milwaukee back into the economic stratosphere.

Walker and civic boosters were effervescent about the promise of nanotechnology as if they actually knew what the word meant. There were serious comparisons to Silicon Valley, to Boston’s technology hub, to Research Triangle Park in North Carolina.

Some dreamers envisioned — get this — Milwaukee’s new high-tech heartbeat linked to those in Chicago and Madison via high-speed rail!

But this beloved brainchild was born sickly, failed to thrive, persists for now on life support, and it looks like the plug is about to be pulled.

Is it in fact too late to save Innovation Campus? Probably, but perhaps there is still a chance.

Walker’s proposed capital budget is expected within days. He already has promised to provide more funding to the UW System. With the stroke of a pen, he could commit to a life-saving infusion of state funding, and he could use his bully pulpit to prompt the Legislature to go along.

Stranger and more unexpected things have happened. But at the moment, it doesn’t look good.

The City of Wauwatosa, which controls planning, zoning and permitting for the site, more than a year ago commissioned a new master plan for the County Grounds and surrounding area, from Mayfair Road to Wauwatosa Village. The draft plan calls for $1.7 billion in mixed-use commercial and residential development in the area — not a bit of it dedicated exclusively to technology research and development, and especially not to tax-exempt academic institutions.

This master plan makes no bones about it — it looks like the obituary of Innovation Campus, and much else that it stood for. It calls for in-filling with high-density, high-scale commercial development. A map shows half-a-dozen commercial building footprints where UWM’s research center was supposed to be.

One section of the draft plan, titled “Innovation Campus Revisited,” offers an open-casket view of the corpse. In part:

“Earlier plans for Innovation Campus have been completed and approved by multiple agencies and organizations. Those agreements, however, represent a continuation of lower density development. ... This Plan envisions a much denser alternative. ...

“This Plan proposes options for mixed-use development with residential, office buildings, and modest retail.”

You might think UWM itself would have something to say about this, but hardly so. In 2010, after agreeing to buy the 89-acre tract, UWM went to the Board of Regents for the money to build it out. The regents declined.

UWM turned to the private, non-profit UWM Real Estate Foundation to figure out how to make things work. Ultimately, Walker, that effusive pourer of jet fuel, declined a requested $75 million in state funding in the 2015-’17 capital budget for the research center. No significant local investment was forthcoming.

The Real Estate Foundation was left holding the bag. Efforts to sell off chunks of UWM’s Innovation Campus began immediately and were only marginally successful. A plan that had called for up to 17 buildings (including the research center), some with multiple tenants, has yielded just three tax-paying constructions to date: ABB Inc., Mandel Group’s Echelon Apartments and a Marriott Residence Inn hotel. All UWM has to show is the Accelerator building, a modest 25,000 square feet that it shares with Marquette and Concordia universities. It was built with federal funds solicited by Wauwatosa.

Real Estate Foundation Director Dave Gilbert, approached by a reporter who had acquired a copy of Tosa’s plan, delivered this eulogy couched as reincarnation:

“I don’t view the concepts proposed in the draft as a departure from our current plans. It is more of an evolution of our Innovation Campus that warrants close examination,” Gilbert told the BizTimes in December.

Wauwatosa bonded $12.5 million to fund city infrastructure on Innovation Campus — Discovery Parkway, and utilities designed to serve a powerhouse — and created a tax incremental finance district to pay that back. It offered millions more to prospective tenants, most of whom did not bite. That essential tax increment, along with the base property tax, is now being paid by a handful of landowners. Yet, in a mind-boggling bit of five-card-stud, all-in thinking, Tosa’s first move would be to build another, even longer road across the County Grounds — in hopes of lining it with office towers and upscale apartments.

Tosa’s answer, with the apparent acquiescence of UWM, is to do away with restrictions on the type and density of development, and not on Innovation Campus only but also on the other two legs of jet-fueled stool — the Regional Medical Center and Research Park.

It also would limit further expansion of the Medical Center to a “Medical District” that it already mostly occupies south of Watertown Plank Road and, via this new road, open up land north of Watertown Plank that always has been reserved for future Medical Center growth to more high-density commercial development. And it would allow more mixed-use, non-tech-oriented development at Research Park itself.

The Tosa plan won’t do what Innovation Campus was intended to do. It won’t be a magnet pulling in new, innovative people and ideas from around the nation and around the world, creating thousands of jobs and dynamic, jaw-dropping new technologies. It will just move people around the metro area. And the 6,500 new residential units it envisions wouldn’t draw in new residents from outside metro Milwaukee — it just would move metro Milwaukee people out of their current neighborhoods and into Wauwatosa.

Against stiff opposition, Bud Selig got Miller Park built with public funding. The Milwaukee Bucks are getting a fab new arena, surrounded by a glitzy new district of bars and restaurants, funded in large part by taxpayers.

But we couldn’t do this. We couldn’t make a similar investment in knowledge, even for far less money than either of our sports arenas cost. It’s sad. It’s embarrassing. Hence all the silence.

Jim Price is a freelance journalist who lives in Wauwatosa.