Council, School Board Will Discuss Redevelopment Options

The Oak Creek Common Council and School Board will hold a joint meeting Monday to discuss redevelopment options at the former Delphi site, 7929 S. Howell Ave., and the Civic Center site at the corner of Howell and Puetz.

The meeting will begin at 7 p.m. in the cafeteria of , 340 E. Puetz Road. It will be televised on the city's public access channels (channel 25 on Time Warner Cable and channel 99 on AT&T Uverse).

Though no expansion of the high school is imminent, one scenario city officials want to discuss is whether the district would, at some point, be interested in expanding the school onto the Civic Center site. (School officials say OCHS is near capacity now and project enrollment will continue to increase.)

The Oak Creek-Franklin School District owns 50 acres of land near Oakwood and Howell avenues that was designated for a second high school. If it instead chose to expand the current school, those 50 acres could then be used for private development. 

So far, reaction to that proposal has been mixed. Monday night's meeting could go a long way in determining the likelihood of it coming to fruition.

While that option has been the most discussed, it's not the only possibility out there. Some others:

• The city hall and library stay where they are.

• The city hall and library move to Delphi and the Civic Center site is developed into commercial properties.

• One of the buildings (most likely city hall) stays at the Civic Center site and the other goes to Delphi.

City officials hope the council's decision on where to put the library and city hall comes sooner rather than later. The council could decide as early as Feb. 7, its next regularly-scheduled meeting.

So, it should be an interesting meeting on Monday. The city has been criticized at times for trying make plans on behalf of the school district. Whether that's fair or not, we should get a better idea of where school officials stand on things and where the city will go from here.