Oregon Observer The
Thursday, December 21, 2017 • Vol. 133, No. 25 • Oregon, WI • ConnectOregonWI.com • $1
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Village of Oregon
Hotel construction set for spring The Oregon Village Board Monday unanimously approved a development agreement with Oregon Hotel LLC. for the construcBILL LIVICK tion of a three-story, 66-room Sleep Inn Hotel on Park Street in Unified Newspaper Group the spring. Adam Coyle, managing memAfter nearly a decade of dashed hopes, it looks like a new hotel is ber of Oregon Hotel LLC., plans coming to the village’s south side to begin building around March 1 and have the hotel open by Oct. 1, next year.
Board approves development agreement
he told the Observer. Coyle met with the Village Board Monday for the second time this month, which quickly approved the development agreement. He previously went before the board on Dec. 4 and requested $800,000 in tax-increment financing, which the board approved unanimously in a closed session. The financing is meant to
facilitate construction of the hotel at the corner of Park Street and Rosewood Avenue, near the Hwys. 14/138 interchange. Coyle told village officials the estimated project cost is $7.2 million and the financial assistance would also help pay the project’s debt service. The anticipated assessed value of the hotel is $4.3 million, he said.
The hotel will be built in the village’s tax-increment financing district No. 4, which must close by 2035. It will have a base value of $255,800, will include an indoor swimming pool, and must be substantially complete by the end of 2018, per the agreement. During discussion before the
Turn to Hotel/Page 3
Brooklyn Police Department
Village keeps PD Survey shows overwhelming preference over using sheriff’s office SCOTT GIRARD Unified Newspaper Group
Photo by Alexander Cramer
Firefighters float in a hole in the ice of a pond on Oregon’s southeast side during a joint training exercise between the Brooklyn and Oregon Fire departments. The newly purchased suits and ropes they are using are part of an effort to revamp the departments’ ice rescue procedures.
OFD, BFD train for ice rescues First test of new equipment, plans was last week ALEXANDER CRAMER Unified Newspaper Group
“Ready? Pull! Pull! Now you lift out there. Lift!” These sounds echoed across a frozen pond on Oregon’s southeast side long after dark on a cold night last week. Floodlights illuminated a group of about 50 people who had gathered as part of a joint training exercise between the Brooklyn Fire Department and Oregon Area Fire/EMS. They were testing out recently purchased equipment to aid in cold-water and broken-ice rescues. “We had about four inches of ice
— it was bad ice, but that was exactly what we wanted,” Oregon fire/EMS chief Glen Linzmeier said, explaining the training circumstances. “We want to put our people in, we want them to utilize our equipment, put the boat in, get across that thin ice, and be able to clinch on to (the victim) and safely pull them out of the water.” The purpose of the training was to familiarize firefighters with new equipment the departments had jointly purchased that revolutionizes how they handle water rescue operations. “That was the first night of orientation operations, and we brought the suits out and the ropes out and the boat, and the pertinent information,” Linzmeier said. “We trained together and got everybody on the same SOP (standard operating procedures) and made sure everyone is trained on the
equipment.” The departments spent roughly $12,000 for the equipment, splitting the cost and storing half the equipment in Brooklyn and the other half in Oregon. Linzmeier said the department raised about $3,000 from an October pancake breakfast, and that the other half was donated by district residents. T h e n ew e q u i p m e n t — e i g h t ice-rescue suits, buoyant ropes and a self-inflating boat — allows the departments to safely approach a victim across thin ice or even open water. Before, rescuers generally were forced to remain a safe distance from the victim while they attempted to offer aid and waited for help from surrounding departments.
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The message from a recent community survey was similar to the one received at a community forum last month: Keep the Brooklyn Police Department. The Village Board followed that advice Dec. 11, as it voted to keep the local department and promoted acting chief Wade Engelhart to full-time chief. More than 80 percent of the respondents on the village-wide survey supported that option over switching to have policing service from a dedicated
Dane County Sheriff ’s deputy. The Village Board began considering a switch after chief Harry Barger retired in September. Many of the attendees at the forum were upset the idea was even being considered. But Village President Clayton Schulz has said the consideration was simply a matter of due diligence – using a major personnel transition to investigate if there were better options available. “If we never ask, we’ll never know,” Schulz said at the Nov. 8 forum. The board determined contracting for a single deputy would save money, but contracting with two – and still providing less coverage than the department plans to – would cost more than continuing with the PD.
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Oregon School District
Help and Hope But OMS Schools of Hope coordinator Lisbeth Solano is hoping some simple addition will provide SCOTT DE LARUELLE the right answer, as Solano Unified Newspaper Group she seeks to Algebra is one of the bring in more volunteers to subjects most in need for help out. the Oregon Middle School tutoring program. Turn to Hope/Page 5
New ‘Schools of Hope’ coordinator loves seeing tutors, students bond
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