By Adam J. Blust
One of the centerpieces of the Sustain Dane Summit on November 3 at Monona Terrace was an update on two major community projects centered on sustainability: the Lake Monona Waterfront development, and the Dane County Sustainability Campus.
Lake Monona Waterfront
Landscape architect Ed Freer of GRAEF updated the group on the Lake Monona development.
“In my 50-year career, it’s one of the most energetic and publicly-supported projects I’ve been involved in,” Freer said. “The momentum is tremendous. The complexity is tremendous. The outcomes are going to be fabulous.”
The project’s over-arching goal is to transform a portion of Lake Monona’s shoreline – 1.7 miles of shoreline and 17 acres – into a beautiful, activity-rich signature park that embodies the character and values of the city.
In January 2023, the City of Madison’s appointed the Ad-Hoc Lake Monona Waterfront Committee that chose Sasaki, along with project partners GRAEF and others, to create the project master plan.
While Freer said their plan is scheduled to be unveiled at the end of this year or the beginning of 2024, that’s just the start of this transformation.
Freer said he has been impressed by the amount of community engagement the project has received so far. Nearly 400 people were on hand for the beginning this phase of the project in January, with 2,500 more people watching online.
“I look at public engagement not just as a political thing, as a feel-good thing. When you want projects to be successful, by having public engagement, you just are planting the seeds,” he said.
But there are many challenges to be faced. The site is narrow, and has to take into account existing transportation and environmental factors that a lakefront with train tracks and limited access points must consider.
Freer said he and his colleagues, while discussing the project over a meal, came up with the idea of listening to the “voices of the lake” when designing the shape of what could be done. That’s challenging when a project has to work year-round and take politics, environment and social issues into account.
Freer encouraged his audience at the Summit to get involved however they could in the Lake Monona Waterfront project: speak with local politicians, go to public meetings. One of the common problems with community projects, he said, is that people are much more likely to express their displeasure than their support.
“It’s your lake. You own it. You help raise it,” he said.
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City of Madison – Lake Monona Waterfront
Dane County Sustainability Campus
John Welch, Director of the Dane County Department of Waste & Renewables, put the situation in stark terms for the Summit audience.
“In 2029, our landfill will be full. So what do we do next?” he said.
“It’s not okay to just close the door and say our community’s going to ship our waste somewhere else. We’re going to truck it an hour and a half down the road and put that burden on some other community,” Welch said.
The plan for the next few decades in Dane County starts with the county purchasing the eastern half of Yahara Hills Golf Course – a little over 200 acres – for a new Sustainability Campus project.
“We don’t want to have just a landfill. We want to help create areas where we can encourage businesses to come in or we can create programs ourselves to divert more and more waste materials,” Welch said.
The campus is designed to be a hub for the community and local businesses to design new ways to deal with all the waste they produce. One of the biggest focuses initially will be on dealing with organic and food waste; approximately a third of all food that’s grown is currently thrown away.
The department is currently interviewing consultants to help design a waste composting facility that should open no later than the spring of 2026 that will take on all organic waste, yard waste and food waste.
Welch said a centerpiece of their plans involve promoting circular economies, where items are repaired when possible, using recycled materials to create markets, and more items are engineered in the first place to be recyclable.
So what happens to the existing landfill?
It will become a conservancy, a community resource, a place of recreation, Welch said. They have already capped approximately 32 acres of the landfill in the last five years, creating a pollinator-friendly, butterfly-friendly prairie grass field.
“We see the entire site likely capped like that with walking trails, potentially boardwalks to the wetlands to the north,” Welch said. “We want it to go from this place that nobody wants to go to, to having it be an asset for the community.”
One of the focuses of the project is that it make sense economically as well as socially and environmentally.
“How can we bring in businesses, continue to divert waste recycled materials and have that at least pay for itself?” Welch said. “We want to set that that standard and be an example for other communities to follow.”
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