Water in Howards Grove may stymie larger development, but changing that would be expensive and challenging
HOWARDS GROVE – Driving to a business in a different town can be a routine necessity for roughly 3,200 residents living in Howards Grove.
But a reason for the village’s lack of large development could be right under their feet: water.
The village ‘works around’ well water
Howards Grove residents and businesses are among 30% of Wisconsin residents to use private well systems, compared to those in a city like Sheboygan that utilizes municipal water.
Buildings and households are fitted with private wells, sometimes shared between two homes, and often equipped with storage tanks and pumps.
Well water can also have high mineral content, so residents often have water softeners and iron filters to treat hardness and high iron levels.
“Some of that bothers some people more than others,” Village Board President Jeff Plass said. “Some, it doesn't bother at all. I think if you grew up here, it's nothing. If you moved here from someplace that had municipal water, maybe you're a little disappointed.”
Whether it’s dealing with water quality at home or developing with a well water system — the case for businesses like Piggly Wiggly and Harvest Homes Assisted Living — Plass said everyone “works around it.”
Lack of municipal water may deter large developers
While residents adjust, Howards Grove’s water may be a barrier for larger developers. One reason is ensuring there’s a reliable water source for sprinkler systems.
“That added infrastructure is really where the cost is,” Plass said.
Buildings with a reliable connection to public water, assuming it has large enough volume and pressure capacities, can generally source stored water and ready sprinkler systems in case of a fire.
Issues may arise if public water systems don’t have enough pressure with demand changes or fluctuations during droughts or flooding, according to the National Fire Protection Association.
The challenge with outfitting a well water-dependent building with sprinklers comes in a worst-case scenario, like a power outage during a storm, Plass said. The water system would have no electricity to pump the water and extinguish the fire. A building would need a backup generator and diesel pump.
This added infrastructure can be costly, and businesses may opt out for somewhere else.
An apartment developer expressed interest in an affordable housing development that could’ve provided around 50 rental units in Howards Grove a few years ago, the Sheboygan Press confirmed. It could've operated with the necessary infrastructure, but was deterred by the high costs of equipping a sprinkler system without a public water system.
A cheese manufacturer also expressed interest in the area but decided against it, Plass said.
Cheesemaking is water intensive, and while the decision to develop elsewhere may have been attributed to water, Plass said there are other factors for manufacturers to consider, too.
"They (manufacturers) pick locations that look best from a transport point of view, from a labor force point of view, you know, how economic is it for them?” he said. “The fact that they did not end up here doesn't necessarily mean it was just the water part.”
'Plenty of willingness’ for new business
It's uncommon for developing communities to still have well water, Plass said.
“It’s not rare for a community to have a few deep, high-capacity wells, but then the municipality manages that,” he said. “They collect it from groundwater. They treat it and then distribute it to the residents. Ultimately, it all comes from Earth, but I think any developing municipality nowadays has municipal-supplied water.”
This is the case for Oostburg, which has three high-capacity wells, a 250,000-gallon water tower and a 60,000-gallon underground reservoir distributed through a public system.
If an area can be serviced by municipal water, Greg LeMahieu, Oostburg’s water utility supervisor, said the village tries to eliminate private wells because it’s frowned upon by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
“You can have cross contamination for private wells in your municipal wells or in your municipal system,” like bacteria and inorganic metals, LeMahieu said.
LeMahieu said the first call he gets from prospective developers is if Oostburg can meet their water demands for manufacturing, sewage or sprinklers.
Oostburg’s system has attracted large companies to its business park, like Masters Gallery Foods, Dutchland Plastics and an expected 254,000-square-foot Oshkosh Cold Storage facility.
Plass said water may be a reason for a lack of large development in Howards Grove, but “there’s plenty of power. There's plenty of willingness on the part of the board to entertain any new businesses in town or in the area, really.”
According to Howards Grove’s 20-year comprehensive plan, which was adopted in 2007, growth and development, and subsequently population and land-use changes, slowed as a result of the Great Recession of 2008.
A lack of public water hasn’t led to a complete absence of businesses. The village has long-standing staples like Miller’s Glen Golf Course, Howards Grove Meat Market and Log Cabin Inn as well as busy gas stations along highways 32 and 42. A youth center also has plans to remodel an old bowling alley.
Chad Pelishek, Sheboygan’s director of planning and development, pointed to several benefits of a municipality having businesses: job creation, increased property taxes and a "spillover" of more businesses in the area.
Plass said larger development is something he’d love to support, but it hasn’t been a focus for the board.
“We just haven't been able to get any real solid businesses here,” Plass said. “We're looking for employment opportunities. We're looking to, obviously, improve our tax base a little bit ... and move forward but ...we don't have a strategy as a village to push manufacturing at this point.”
And with the hikes in costs for building materials and construction seen over the last few years, not a lot of developers have expressed interest in building, he said.
Plass imagines that “building would start fast and furious again” once the economy settles and costs decline.
Tapping into municipal water would be structurally challenging and costly.
It could be expensive for Howards Grove to connect to a public system, Sheboygan Water Utility Superintendent Joe Trueblood said.
Unlike Sheboygan Falls and Kohler, which had their own water systems before connecting to Sheboygan’s as wholesale buyers, Howards Grove would face unique infrastructural challenges that include installing large underground pipes to connect to a source and offshoot pipes for distribution.
Water is one municipal service that incentivizes businesses to come to Sheboygan, Trueblood said.
“For cities like Sheboygan, having a good, reliable source of water is something that they use to attract businesses within the city,” he said. “They don't necessarily want to provide water to just any parties that come along that don't want to locate in the city.”
If Howards Grove also wanted to install a water tower, LeMahieu estimates it could cost upwards of $1 million depending on the size.
Plass said developing a municipal system is cost prohibitive for the village. Only about $643,000 is designated for Public Works, according to the 2023 budget.
“It'd be millions and millions, and we don't have that kind of money saved up for that at this time,” he said.
Howards Grove may not reap immediate benefits from new water system
LeMahieu doesn’t know if it’d be worth it for a town to transition to municipal water just for business development, especially Howards Grove so near to towns like Sheboygan.
“That would be beyond me, but I know you’d spend a lot of money,” he said.
Moving people off private wells has been worth it for Oostburg, though, because most of its water infrastructure was built in the 1920s and 1930s.
"When you're running a water system or sewer system, the most efficient way to operate them is to have enough revenue base,” LeMahieu said. “So for us, we already have the system. The more customers and revenue we can generate, the better.”
In addition to having a good workforce and being positioned to attract chains like Kwik Trip near Interstate 43, LeMahieu said a municipal water system “was definitely beneficial” to attract businesses.
However, Oostburg faced challenges after building its industrial park in the early 2000s when the 2008 recession hit.
"We had a lot of debt service on a lot of our new infrastructure for years,” LeMahieu said. “Basically, since Masters Gallery has moved in the last couple of years, (the) industrial park has started to pay for itself.
“But it was almost a distressed business district for quite a few years because we didn't have any development, and we had millions of dollars' worth of infrastructure in the ground waiting to be developed,” he said.
Sheboygan’s $10.5 millionSouthPointe Enterprise Campus — a solution to the near-capacity Sheboygan Business Center — also sat empty for a few years until its first tenant broke ground last October.
More:Uptown Social opened, SouthPointe Enterprise Campus got first tenant. Here's what to know.
Plass said Howards Grove would likely need a grant, incentive or other circumstance to force the transition to municipal water.
“... We don't have any plans in the immediate future to open that issue,” he said.
The village reduced how often municipal water discussions happen
In the village’s 2017 addendum to its 20-year comprehensive plan, the board voted to reduce discussions and review for a municipal water system from an “annual basis” to an “as needed basis.”
Plass, who was on the board at the time, recalled there might have been a couple board members who wanted to push for municipal water. After discussing the associated costs, though, it wasn’t something the village could afford.
“I think we realized at about that time that there's really no need to think about it annually because it's not an issue that anything's going to change from year to year,” he said.
The village doesn’t have any current discussions about it right now, Plass said.
When asked about concern for groundwater quality in the future, Plass said the village has been “lucky.”
“The quality of the groundwater has been quite good, I think,” he said. “But nobody knows what's going to happen 50 years from now, obviously.”
Residents are responsible for testing their private wells but are not required to. The DNR recommends private well owners do routine testing: bacteria and nitrate tests at least once a year and arsenic tests at least once, with the condition to test yearly if it’s found in previous tests.
Businesses could alleviate tax burdens but change Howards Grove's 'quaintness,' some residents say
Since moving to the village about six years ago, Jane Kesting has noticed on walks that residents tend to leave on the weekend. She figures the outflux is for traveling sports teams or people choosing to recreate elsewhere.
“The town is absolutely deserted,” Kesting said. “I don’t see anyone.”
Mark Zimmer, a Howards Grove resident since the 1980s and a retired funeral home owner of nearly 40 years, said he’s always seen the village as a bedroom community.
He’s personally eyed Oostburg’s business park, though. He thought it’d be nice to have something similar in Howards Grove to alleviate the property tax burden off residents, especially for projects like construction of a new middle school — the result of a narrowly passed $39.8 million referendum.
"We all in Howards Grove have to soak up (costs) to pay for the public schools," Jolene Ketelhohn, an 11-year resident, said.
Ketelhohn said more businesses in an area, like Sheboygan, could alleviate residential property taxes.
At the same time, she said everything she wants is close enough to the village and doesn’t need “anything in my back yard.”
“People move to the area because it is quaint and then all this expansion is not really what people want to see for a town or a village like Howards Grove,” Ketelhohn said.
Overall, Zimmer said he likes living in the village. He doesn’t know if having larger development would be for better or worse.
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Contact Alex Garner at 224-374-2332 or agarner@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter at @alexx_garner.
This article originally appeared on Sheboygan Press: Howards Grove water may limit large development, changing that would be expensive
