Residents praise the local campus

MARINETTE — Sally Hasenfus said she recently had a bad dream involving the UW-Green Bay — Marinette Campus.

“I had a nightmare that the whole campus was torn down and moved to condos,” she said Wednesday during a listening session in the Herb L. Williams Theatre at the campus. “It was the worst nightmare I think I ever had. I woke up crying.”

Hasenfus was one of more than a dozen people who spoke — some passionately — during the session, set up by Marinette County Administrator John Lefebvre to receive public input on the property. UWGB recently announced it will suspend in-person learning at the campus after this semester. In January, books from the campus library were piled in a dumpster and sent to a landfill.

“The one good thing about that (the book disposal) is that it ticked us off,” Hasenfus said.

Most of the speakers talked about the virtues of the campus, its history, its beautiful landscape and the desire to keep it as some sort of public place, possibly a campus, and not sold to a private developer who may flatten it and turn it into housing.

“I just want to ask you to do one thing,” Judith Johnson said. “Look up the story of the Phoenix. It’s a rare, magical bird, and it’s able to burst into flames and return from the ashes. And guess what? When something like this is gone, it ain’t returning from the ashes. It’s gone. So let’s take what we have now and work with it.”

UW-Green Bay’s mascot is the Phoenix, selected in 1970 when students voted in a “pick the mascot” contest in the student newspaper.

Hasenfus, who said she has studied at multiple campuses in earning her degrees, said the Marinette campus is special.

“It’s an amazing campus. An amazing area,” she said. “This campus brings something out in people that I haven’t experienced anywhere else.”

She said UW-Marinette was a great place for her to start and by starting locally, more people may be inclined to return here to live and work.

Daniel Kapp, a St. Louis native who attended a community college in Missouri, spoke about the virtues of in-person learning.

“You cannot learn certain things online,” he said. “There are certain things you can only get with field or hands-on experience.”

Kapp encouraged partnerships with NWTC or local businesses and industries to get some movement on the campus. He’s against selling to a developer.

“You should not let this get sold out,” he warned. “A developer will come in, tear everything down and make a profit. You guys might make a little bit of money, but you’re going to get screwed. Pardon my French. I’ve seen that happen so many times.”

Trygve Rhude, a county supervisor who represents District 22 where the campus is located, said the property must remain public. He said it would be a perfect location in the National Estuarine Research Reserve (NERR) System. NERR is a national network of sites across the coastal United States, including the Great Lakes, designed to protect and study estuaries and their coastal wetlands.

Rhude said UWGB Chancellor Michael Alexander incorrectly stated that a NERR site will be located in Green Bay. He said the site has not been chosen and the UWGB-Marinette Campus would make a great location.

Paul Erdman, a former physics professor at UW-Marinette, spoke about the emptiness at the local campus.

“When I come back and visit this campus now, I notice primarily there is nobody here. It’s a real dead area,” he said. “That’s really depressing. How do you recruit students into a building where nobody else is hanging around? There’s no socialization in this place. There’s no life to it.”

His “off the wall” solution is to have area high school students, the upper grades, have some classes at campus. He said college courses could be taught as well.

“Once you get students on this campus, you start to have a life to it again,” Erdman said. “They get used to it and think of it as their other home.”

Hasenfus said in-person learning is important and one way to get students’ heads out of their phones.

“We want them together,” she said. “We want in-person campus classes. We want our kids to know how to socialize.”

Supervisor Stan Gruszynski, a former state representative, said he also could talk about the history and his association with the campus, but it won’t change anything.

“I, too, want to see something happen other than have it sold out to the private sector,” he said. “But it’s going to take a lot of work and a lot of people working together to make something like that happen.”

Gruszynski said the university is moving in the direction the UW Board of Regent desires and it has legislative support.

“That doesn’t mean we should give up this property or give up the ideals of improving the community through theater, education, association with public sector needs, such as childcare and otherwise,” he said. “Every person I talked to seems to feel that there is a value here that shouldn’t be lost from the public sector. And I agree with that whole heartedly.”

“The county board needs a robust discussion on this property that we own. We need to act like leaders and the supervisors we were elected to be, to do our very best to come up with the answers that most of you have expressed.”

Gruszynski asked Lefebvre what he sees moving forward.

“The way I look at it, we’re going to have some kind of a visioning session or planning session,” Lefebvre said. “Who ultimately is going to hold that is yet to be determined. I do believe that that’s going to take place. In the short run we need to partner with UWGB to make sure that they achieve what they are trying to do, which is to continue education out of this facility as much as they possibly can, reduce their footprint in this facility, which would open the door for us to see exactly the amount of available space.”

Lefebvre said the planning part is going to take some time.

He also spoke about the county’s financial situation, including a capped operating levy that only increases by approximately 1% annually. He said 1% of a $17 million operating levy is about $170,000. Meanwhile, wages for about 400 county employees can increase 2.5% or about $800,000 in a year.

“That’s why we are up against the wall,” he said.

“We’re not trying to kick the can down the road, but the can is slowly getting kicked down the road. We’re getting to that point where we just can’t shift our expenses any more.”

Lefebvre said the county will have some serious budget discussions in 2025.

“Every single service we provide goes out there in the community and touches someone — elderly, disabled, mentally ill, people who have substance abuse problems, law enforcement, other services like highway operations,” he said.