WAUSAU, WI (WSAU) — The Wausau School District will be moving forward in accepting a generous land donation to the district.
At a special meeting of the Board of Education on Monday night, the full board approved the donation of a 20-acre parcel of land from PGA Inc., by Hawthorn Hills Elementary. The land will only cost the district about $1,000 for paperwork like the title and an appraisal of the land.
Board President Jeff Leigh explains that one of the reasons the district likes the piece of land is that it secures the district’s perimeter. “It allows us to control our perimeter which is always a good thing. Because you never know exactly how you’re going to need to expand and it’s always good to have control of that land.”
He says the district would mainly like to use the land to extend Washington Street to have better traffic flow to the elementary school.
“It gives the potential of continuing Washington Street to the east, hooking south, and linking up then. And creating a new opportunity to ease the traffic flow. Right now we have buses coming in, parents coming in, and going right back out the same road. Which creates congestion and of course with that kind of congestion your possibility of accidents goes up.”
This isn’t the first time the school board has had this piece of land up for the district. About a year ago PGA Inc. wanted to sell the land to the district. At that point, the board discussed developing the land for turnover costs. And Leigh says the land could potentially be used for real estate at some point in the future.
“One of the issues we came into immediately was, well do we want to be in the business of land development. And that’s not really what we should be focusing our time on. But that doesn’t mean we couldn’t now do that as a way to very quickly recoup some of the cost and then use whatever additional comes in to benefit the students of our district.”
The donation will be officially approved by the school board at their next regular meeting on December 10th. The changing of hands for the land will be finalized a few weeks after that December 10th date.
