Marketplace Today Blog

By Rick Romell
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Lenders provided $31.4 million in government-guaranteed financing to Wisconsin small businesses in January — down from the December number but higher than the January levels of the last few years.

January typically is a slow month for U.S. Small Business Administration loans, Eric Ness, the agency’s director for Wisconsin, said Monday. But despite the continued economic sluggishness, a package of government incentives designed to stimulate lending lifted the monthly total above any January back through at least 2006.

“It’s pretty amazing that in this economy we’re higher than the last four or five years,” Ness said. “It’s working.”

The $31.4 million extended last month compares with $17.0 million in January 2009, $29.2 million in January 2008, $25.7 million in January 2007 and $23.8 million in January 2006.

The largest loans last month included $1.7 million from Legacy Bank for the City Market restaurant to be opened in Whitefish Bay, $1.5 million from the Wisconsin Business Development Finance Corp. for a Hampton Inn in Tomah and $1.4 million from the finance corporation to Burlington Hotel Group LLC in Burlington.

Reacting early last year to the recession, the federal government increased its guarantees on SBA loans and agreed to pay fees that formerly had fallen to borrowers.

Also implemented were measures to encourage purchase of loans by secondary parties — an important step because by selling some of its loans a bank gains money it can then lend to other businesses. The secondary market all but froze with the economic crisis of 2008, Ness said.

“Since 40 percent of the loans are sold, we needed to get that functioning so they get the cash to relend,” he said.

The Obama administration is proposing further steps to increase lending to small businesses, including raising to $5 million the current $2 million limit on loans under the SBA’s workhorse 7(a) program.

By Ryan Haggerty
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Officials at all levels of government must quickly formulate a plan — and be willing to close locks on Chicago’s canal system — to slow or prevent the advance of Asian carp into Lake Michigan, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Barrett said Monday.

“We are strongly urging the White House, we are strongly urging the [Environmental Protection Agency] to take whatever steps are necessary, including the closing of the Chicago sanitary canal if that is what’s required, to make sure that the Asian carp does not enter into Lake Michigan,” Barrett said. “This is a very, very serious problem.”

Milwaukee mayor Barrett, Cudahy Mayor Ryan McCue and Kenosha Mayor Keith Bosman spoke during a morning news conference at Discovery World on Milwaukee's lakefront, just hours before Monday afternoon’s Asian carp “summit” at the White House. Great Lakes governors will meet with Obama administration officials to strategize how to best deal with the invasive species.

Asian carp threaten to upend Lake Michigan’s ecosystem and damage the lake’s commercial and recreational fishing industries by disrupting the lake’s food chain.

Water tests for Asian carp DNA reveal the fish have breached an electric barrier on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal 20 miles downstream from Lake Michigan, and researchers believe a small population is likely now swimming in the lake.

Politicians beyond Illinois are now clamoring for emergency lock closures on the Chicago canal system to block the carp, which have been migrating north since they escaped their Arkansas containment ponds in the 1970s.

Barrett said he hopes Monday’s White House summit would help Illinois officials and representatives of other Great Lakes states reach a consensus on how to proceed.

“I think that everybody recognizes that this is a serious issue, and the question is what’s the appropriate remedy,” Barrett said. “I think it is very, very important that the governors, the White House and the EPA come up with a strategy to ensure that the carp do not enter the Great Lakes.”

By Bruce Vielmetti
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The Wisconsin legislator yelling the loudest about restricting public access to the state’s online court records admits he hasn’t gotten nearly the complaints about the current system as he claimed, the Associated Press reports.

Rep. Marlin Schneider (D–Wisconsin Rapids) wants to restrict the popular service, known as CCAP, to only records of people who have been convicted of crimes, not those that are only pending or have been dismissed or ended in acquittals. He said he sought the changes because hundreds of people had told him tales of how information from CCAP prevented them from renting homes or getting jobs.

But Schneider fessed up after the Associated Press requested copies of all complaints he had received about CCAP. The total, over four years, was 59 — and only 22 were from people who had had criminal charges dismissed.

Schneider National in Ashwaubenon today announced plans to grow its regional driving fleet to 2,500 this year.

“Work-life balance is more important than ever to today’s professional truck driver,” said Mike Hinz, vice president, Schneider National. “Schneider’s regional driving opportunities are a perfect fit for those drivers who want to make a good living with a company that will be here tomorrow, and at the same time, enjoy more time at home with their families.”

Schneider now offers regional driving opportunities across the U.S. with operations offices in the West, Southwest, Midwest, Southeast and Northeast regions. Strong reception of the service by customers and drivers, alike, has accelerated Schneider’s regional expansion plans, according to a Schneider National news release. Hiring will continue throughout the year and all 2,500 drivers will be in place by December.

According to Hinz, Schneider’s rapid expansion is due to a growing freight base within each of its five regions. “The customer demand for our regional service has exceeded our expectations and created enough freight density to get drivers home weekly,” he said.

In addition to the new regional driving opportunities, Schneider will continue to provide long-haul service for customers. “Consistent with our recent selection as a TCA Best Fleet to Drive For, Schneider National remains committed to providing opportunities that fit all lifestyles,” said Hinz. “Regional and Dedicated opportunities get drivers home weekly or better and we still have OTR positions for drivers who enjoy being out on the open road for longer periods.”

More information is available at www.schneiderjobs.com.

Oshkosh Corp. announced today that its Defense division received an award valued at more than $84 million from the U.S. Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command Life Cycle Management Command to supply more than 625 add-on armor kits for the MRAP All Terrain Vehicle.

Oshkosh will provide explosively formed penetrator protection kits for the M-ATV. Delivery of the kits is expected to begin in April and be completed by the end of August. The Oshkosh-supplied kits will include EFP armor, base door armor and a door-assist mechanism.

To date, Oshkosh has received awards valued at more than $4 billion to deliver 6,619 M-ATVs, as well as spare parts kits and aftermarket in-theater support.

The advanced armor system solution for the base Oshkosh M-ATV, prior to installation of EFP kits, has been battle-tested on more than 5,000 legacy MRAPs and thousands of Oshkosh Medium Tactical Vehicle Replacement Armored Cabs already in theater. Incorporation of the Oshkosh-patented TAK-4 independent suspension system allows the M-ATV to accept add-on armor while maintaining its agile maneuverability and a full payload capacity of up to 4,000 pounds.

Existing Oshkosh facilities have the capacity, highly skilled workforce and proven manufacturing capability to deliver this M-ATV order and all other Defense program orders, including the U.S. Army’s Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles, as well as any surges in production, according to an Oshkosh Corp. news release.

By Rick Romell
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Kaushik Patel’s introduction to entrepreneurship was no picnic.

It was 1998 and the economy was booming, but Patel had lost his job as a computer engineer in the Chicago area. Now he was in tiny Sibley, Iowa, cleaning rooms at a Super 8.

That was hard for a college-educated professional to swallow, the town was near “nowhere in the world” and the motel was running in the red. But it was his, and he believed that if he stuck with it he and his family would be rewarded.

They were.

Today Patel has not one hotel but five, including three in Wisconsin — one in Eau Claire, two in Plymouth — and no regrets about abandoning his high-tech field.

“If I would have been in computer engineering I know I would be not [as] happy as I am,” he said.

A lot of Indian–Americans throughout Wisconsin and across the country know the feeling. Immigrants from India have excelled as entrepreneurs, running everything from corner gas stations to a disproportionate share of Silicon Valley start-ups.

Nationally, a recent study found, Indian immigrant business owners average 60 percent more income than U.S. business owners generally, and earn more than entrepreneurs from any other immigrant group.

In Wisconsin, payroll at Indian-owned firms, compared with the number of Indians who live here, far exceeds that of any other Asian ethnic group, and of Hispanic and black-owned businesses.

Wisconsin’s ethnic Indians have developed a good share of the homes built in Brookfield over the last 25 years, grown a nationwide network of computer stores and established a market research firm with offices from Wauwatosa to Singapore.

They own companies involved in metallurgical testing and information technology, chains of convenience stores and filling stations and a rising number of the state’s hotels and motels.

“It’s like a plant that gets Miracle-Gro,” scholar Vivek Wadhwa said. “Take people who have learned to struggle and grow in India and put them in an entrepreneurial society like America and they thrive.”

But it’s more than capacity for struggle. Most immigrants arguably possess that or they wouldn’t have had the determination to leave their homelands. Indians, though, may be more fluent in English than other immigrants when they arrive.

More important, their overall level of education is sky high.

In Wisconsin, for example, the last census found that 74 percent of ethnic Indians 25 or older held at least a bachelor’s degree. The comparable number for state residents as a whole: 22 percent.

Education, said Kailas Rao, one of Wisconsin’s earlier Indian entrepreneurs, helps in business by embedding not just knowledge but methods for applying it.

“Give a question to a person with a high school education, college education, Ph.D., master’s, you get different answers because their way of thinking is different,” Rao said.

Rao (doctorate degree from the University of Oklahoma), who founded and sold first a chain of computer stores and then a wireless communications business, is a former university professor.

So is Vincent Kuttemperoor (master’s, University of Detroit), whose developments in Brookfield alone encompass more than 500 single-family homes, plus apartment buildings, condominiums and office complexes.

So is T.R. Rao (doctorate, Michigan State University), who fully didn’t embrace business ownership until he was in his 50s and who now directs a research firm, Market Probe Inc., with a staff of 350 spread across the globe.

Some Indian entrepreneurs, most notably those from the western state of Gujarat, an economic dynamo and birthplace of literally thousands of U.S. hotel and motel owners, seem as if they’re born to business.

“Business comes to them like eating, like brushing your teeth,” T.R. Rao said.

That wasn’t him. His relatives are priests, bureaucrats, physicians and professors. They were surprised when Rao — no relation to Kailas — moved from academia into business.

“But I just became an American in my thinking,” he said.

Besides advanced education, Rao said, many Indians in business benefit from a persistent attitude. “It’s like an insurance agent, that you need persistence to be successful,” he said.

Richard Van Grinsven saw that when he was a banker writing loans for Indian convenience-store owners.

“Individuals I was working with would put in 16, 18, 20 hours a day,” he said. “ … That’s all they did.” And his clients were well educated too, Van Grinsven said. “There was only maybe a handful that didn’t have the college education sitting in their lap.”

If higher education helps when running a convenience store, it’s all but essential in launching a tech firm. Between 1995 and 2005, while Indians made up 0.6 percent of the U.S. population, they were key founders of 15.5 percent of Silicon Valley start-ups, according to Wadhwa, who holds positions both at Duke University and the University of California, Berkeley.

Across the U.S., he found, they started more engineering and technology companies than immigrants from China, Taiwan, Japan and the United Kingdom combined.

“Indians are the single most educated immigrant group in United States history,” Wadhwa said.

Longtime area entrepreneur Jitu Shah (bachelor’s, Youngstown State University), drew a distinction between Indians who immigrated in the ’60s and ’70s and those who have come since.

Shah, owner of metallurgical testing firm APL Inc. in Milwaukee and co-owner of Utility Tool & Trailer Inc. in Clintonville, said the older group tends to be more educated.

All the same, there are people like Rupesh Agrawal. He came from India in the ’90s, graduated from the Milwaukee School of Engineering and started a business in his mid-20s. Zeon Solutions Inc. had two employees then — Agrawal and his wife, Smita.

Today, Agrawal is 32, and his Web site and software development firm employs 30 people in Milwaukee and 200 worldwide. Sales last year totaled $7 million — up 55 percent from 2008 — and Inc. magazine ranked Zeon 103rd among the nation’s fastest-growing companies.

“When Indians come all the way from India, they’re not satisfied with just the regular life or lifestyle,” Agrawal said, “and what that leads to is more ambition.”

And that doesn’t always lead to entrepreneurial glory.

Darshan Dhaliwal’s early success as a gas-station magnate has given way to financial reorganization in bankruptcy court for his company, Bulk Petroleum, and the threat of personal bankruptcy.

Yogesh Shah has been in federal prison since 2001 after being convicted of fraud in connection with his home-building business, 1043 Development Corp., of Bayside.

In 2000, Sanjiv C. and Rajiv C. Shah — relatives of Yogesh — were charged with defrauding banks that dealt with their Glendale firm, Midwest Mortgage Finance LLC. The brothers fled authorities, and the federal case against them remains open.

Overall, though, the track record nationally and in Wisconsin has been one of success.

The Atlanta-based Asian American Hotel Owners Association says its members own about 40 percent of all hotel rooms in the U.S. The vast majority of those members are ethnic Indians who share the same last name, Patel. Their roots are in Gujarat, where “Patel” is sort of like “Smith.”

Gujaratis were represented heavily among the tens of thousands of Asians forced to leave Uganda by dictator Idi Amin in 1972, and some eventually migrated to the U.S. and bought small roadside motels. With rising gasoline prices suppressing travel, the properties were relatively cheap.

The Gujaratis typically lived on site, economized by using family labor and turned the motels into profitable businesses. Then they bootstrapped their way into more, and better, properties as other Gujarati immigrants followed their example.

“Gujaratis by nature are extremely family oriented,” Milwaukee-area hotel owner Bobby Dhir said. “So as they settled here, they invited more of their kin to the United States and then they had them also move into the family business.”

Wisconsin doesn’t have anywhere near the concentration of Indian hotels and motels other parts of the country do, but a look at a South Asian business directory shows at least a few dozen Patels in the business here.

There are also exceptions — Dhir and Bharat Shah among them. Dhir (master’s, Rutgers) is the rare Indian–American hotelier who isn’t from Gujarat. He was born in New Dehli.

Armed with an electrical engineering degree, he came to the U.S. in 1970 to go to graduate school, later worked as an engineer in North Carolina and then moved to Wisconsin and a Kohler Co. job. He and his wife, Anita, bought their first hotel in 1982 and since have owned several. They now own three Milwaukee-area properties totaling nearly 400 rooms.

“It was kind of natural for us,” Dhir said.

Shah (doctorate, Utah State University) exemplifies how many Gujaratis have worked their way into franchise brands and upscale hotels. Shah immigrated to the U.S. in 1964, earned master’s and doctorate degrees here and joined Nabisco as a chemist. He bought his first hotel, the 90-room Winkler Motor Inn in Winston–Salem, N.C., in 1979.

It did well, and he bought a few other economy hotels — a niche Indians have long dominated. But it was Shah’s son, Mit, fresh out of college, who had the mind and stomach for the big deal.

Taking charge of what father and son had named the Noble Investment Group, Mit began amassing a portfolio that now includes 43 hotels with 8,500 rooms under such brands as W, Marriott and Hyatt. No more Econo Lodges. No more Days Inns.

Among the more recent acquisitions was the 2007 purchase of a 481-room downtown hotel more than 600 miles from the company’s Atlanta headquarters. Noble paid nearly $44 million, and then spent another $19 million on a major renovation.

You may know the place. It’s the Hyatt Regency Milwaukee.

By Dan Egan
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The focus of Monday’s White House Asian carp summit is to stop the giant, ecosystem-ravaging fish from slipping in the Great Lakes’ back door — the Chicago canal system that links the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico.

But the governors who called for the summit don’t just want to talk about carp; they want the Obama administration to tackle the larger issue of invasive species in the Great Lakes, which have become an ecological stew teeming with at least 185 foreign organisms.

And if that discussion is going to occur, it will be impossible for regional and national leaders to ignore what’s going on at the lakes’ front door - the St. Lawrence Seaway, a manmade navigation corridor between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean.

That’s the invasive species pathway biologists say poses the most trouble for the Great Lakes, even if Chicago canals and Asian carp are grabbing all the attention at the moment.

Oceangoing ships dumping contaminated ballast water are blamed for 57 species invasions since Seaway builders blasted their way into the lakes 51 years ago.

Those species include the quagga mussel that now carpets the bottom of Lake Michigan and has literally turned life in the lake into a shell of what it once was — the population of prey fish, which sustain big fish like salmon, has dropped to less than 10% of what it was before invasive mussels arrived two decades ago.

And despite Obama’s 2008 campaign pledge of a “zero tolerance” policy for new Great Lakes invasions and the billions of dollars he plans to spend on the lakes’ restoration, the Seaway door to future invasions remains open. The federal government released a report last year that spotlighted 30 species that have yet to colonize the lakes but are medium- to high-risk candidates to do so.

“I’m glad to see people talking about Asian carp,” says Gary Fahnenstiel, a researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“But, as an ecologist, when you look at the impacts of Seaway invaders like quagga mussels, zebra mussels, spiny water fleas and round gobies, and you compare those impacts to what those of the Asian carp are likely to be - well, there is no comparison.”

There are scientists who know a ton about the ecology of the Great Lakes, and there are scientists who know loads about the biology of Asian carp. The problem is there is nobody who knows exactly what will happen if the two get together.

Prevailing fear says if the jumping carp colonize the lakes they will turn recreational boating into dicey games of aquatic roulette where any boater, jet skier or wake boarder can be cold-cocked at anytime. On heavily infested stretches of rivers in the Mississippi basin, boaters have been battered to the point that some now won’t leave the dock without protective gear.

This is no small concern for Great Lakes states, home to more than 4 million registered boats, about a third of the U.S. total.

More ominously, biologists say the carp could shred what’s left of the lakes’ fishery, valued at more than $7 billion, according to the American Sportfishing Association.

“They are aquatic vacuum cleaners,” says Charlie Wooley, deputy regional director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “They will come in and clean out our native fish and sport fish.”

But Fahnenstiel thinks the plankton-hogging quagga mussels already might have beaten the carp to the punch.

On Lake Huron, for example, changes since the mussel invasion essentially have destroyed the salmon fishery.

The fishery next door on Lake Michigan could be headed down a similar drain; Fahnenstiel’s research shows Lake Michigan’s spring phytoplankton levels have crashed by at least 70 percent in the last decade — that’s food upon which every fish species directly or indirectly depends.

“It’s going to be a famine for Asian carp in the Great Lakes,” Fahnenstiel predicts. “Ten years ago it would have been different.”

Yet Asian carp expert Duane Chapman says neither the lakes nor the biologists who study them have ever seen anything like the ravenous and resourceful silver and bighead carp, which can grow beyond 50 pounds and have a knack for finding food where other fish fail.

“There has been a bioenergetics study that says that bighead and silver carp could not make it on what is available in the open waters of Lake Michigan,” says Chapman, biologist for the U.S. Geological Survey. “But that model does not include other feeding options that [the carp] have.”

Chapman says the fish can thrive on toxic blue-green algae that even quagga mussels reject. They’ll also eat the sewage-like Cladophora that smothers Lake Michigan beaches in late summer. They may even eat mussel excrement.

“Are we certain that Asian carps could make a go of it Lake Michigan? No,” he says. “Should you be worried about it? Yes.”

Most researchers agree the deep, cold and relatively sterile open waters of the big lakes will prove to be an unfriendly place for the carp.

“They’re not going to dominate the deep, cold portions of the lakes; that’s not their bag,” says Mike Hansen, a professor of fisheries at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and chairman of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission. “That doesn’t mean they won’t find a home here and won’t cause problems for some parts of the Great Lakes.”

Not insignificantly, the warmer bays, harbors and rivers where the Asian carp have the best chance of establishing a self-sustaining population are the same places humans tend to congregate.

Fahnenstiel says he isn’t trying to diminish the importance of keeping Asian carp from invading the lakes. He wants permanent barriers built to re-establish the natural separation between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River basin to stop the carp and any other invasive species from moving back and forth between the two grand drainage basins.

But he worries the headline-grabbing carp are distracting the public from the larger issue.

“It’s not just about the canal,” he says. “It’s about all entries to the great lakes.”

Politicians beyond Illinois are now clamoring for emergency lock closures on the Chicago canal system to block the carp that have been migrating north since they escaped their Arkansas containment ponds in the 1970s.

Water tests for Asian carp DNA reveal the fish have breached an electric barrier on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal 20 miles downstream from Lake Michigan, and researchers believe a small population is likely now swimming in the lake.

The idea is to use the locks as a makeshift barrier to give biologists time to figure out how to keep big numbers of the fish from spilling into the lake and establishing a breeding population. The plan to use the leaky locks to cork a biological invasion has been hatched out of desperation and it is by no means guaranteed to work, but advocates for the closure say it’s the best option available.

It is not a popular plan in Chicago.

The barge industry says such a closure would wreak havoc on the region’s economy, and Chicago sewage officials argue that shutting the locks removes the option of using them as safety valves to allow floodwaters to wash into Lake Michigan, instead of city streets and basements.

Yet the close-the-locks charge led by the state of Michigan would allow the gates to open to release floodwaters, and such a closure may not cause the regionwide economic devastation barge industry officials and Chicago-area politicians claim.

A transportation analysis conducted for Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox — gubernatorial hopeful who has sued to close the locks — shows the locks are a surprisingly small piece of Chicago’s transportation system.

It concludes:

• The 7 million tons of cargo that move annually through the locks represents less than 1 percent of all the freight traffic in the region.
• The amount of cargo affected by a lock closure could be handled by the equivalent of two daily trains in the Chicago area, through which about 500 trains move daily.
• The cost to shift these materials to other transportation modes would be less than $70 million annually.

“All I can do is tell you the facts,” says John Taylor, a Wayne State University professor and co-author of the report. “And the facts are these locks are an extremely small part of the Chicago economy. Extremely small.”

Anne Burnes of the barge industry group American Waterways Operators said Friday she had not been able to review Taylor’s report in detail, but that she stands by her group’s assertion that a closure will have big and negative economic impacts on the Chicago area, and it would overburden its roads and rails.

She said there are other solutions and the barge industry is working on finding them.

“Framing this discussion as a choice between shutting off commerce or acquiescing to an Asian carp intrusion into the Great Lakes is a false and unnecessary choice,” she said.

The Obama administration has backed Illinois in opposing the closure.

Critics say it’s a case of politicians succumbing to scare tactics from the navigation industry, and they say they’ve seen it before — with the Seaway. Three years ago a coalition of more than 90 environmental groups called for a moratorium on oceangoing ships entering the Great Lakes until the shipping industry could figure out how to fix its ballast problem.

Ballast tanks, which are filled at one port to steady ships on the open seas and then flushed when they arrive at the next port, are a big problem because they give foreign organisms from around the globe a free ride into the Great Lakes. From there, they can spread inland, in some cases all the way to the West Coast, where quagga mussels now threaten to gum up the dams and irrigation networks.

The proposal went nowhere with regional politicians who worried about what such a closure could mean to the Great Lakes’ economy.

Many of those same politicians evidently aren’t so worried about lock closures in Chicago, despite the fact that the amount of overseas cargo that moved on the Seaway last year was about 7 million tons, the same volume that moves through the two Chicago locks.

The parallels are not lost on conservationists, who think the political tide that’s turned on Chicago in terms of demanding changes in navigation to protect the lakes could roll toward the Seaway.

“Seaway advocates should definitely be paying attention to how this is unfolding,” says Great Lakes United’s Jennifer Nalbone.

The question now is whether these uncomfortable facts will be broached during the carp talks Monday.

The carp, at the moment, are just a threat.

But the ecological destruction linked to ballast water is real, and growing by the day. There are now some 500 trillion quagga mussels smothering the bottom of Lake Michigan, and they literally are sucking the life out of it.

“Right now, we’re witnessing the most significant ecological disruption in the history of the lakes,” Fahnenstiel says.

And it has nothing to do with Asian carp.

American Cancer Society Relay for Life of De Pere will be held at the St. Norbert College Schuldes Sports Center Saturday, March 27 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Area cancer survivors are welcome to join Relay for Life for the Survivors/Balluminary Ceremony beginning at noon. Throughout the day activities will include a silent auction with a variety of items and gift baskets.

For more information, go to www.relayforlife.org/deperewi or contact Lisa Valenta, lisa.valenta@cancer.org, (920) 351-0368, or Karla Miller, rfldepere@yahoo.com.

The Fond du Lac Arts Council, owner and operator of Windhover Center for the Arts, has been awarded a $30,000 Community Impact Grant by the Fond du Lac Area Foundation to plan a proposed downtown Arts, Education and Entertainment District.

The council, teaming up with the Downtown Fond du Lac Partnership, will hire Schreiber Anderson Associates. Schreiber Anderson will prepare a comprehensive vision that includes all of the redevelopment districts targeted for development by the partnership’s Economic Restructuring Committee.

To complete the project, Schreiber Anderson will employ a team of consultants, including The North Group, Inc., cultural arts consultants of New York; BEST Real Estate Group, Inc., a market analysis and real estate development consultants of Cottage Grove; and Coalesce, marketing and communications consultants of Appleton.

“The Community Impact Grant not only provides necessary funding, but also signifies widespread support within the community for the project,” said Arts Council Executive Director Kevin Miller.

Foundation Executive Director Sandi Roehrig said the council’s grant proposal was successful because “the desired outcome was dedicated to improving the quality of life for the entire community.

“This project will help the Arts Council create a thriving downtown centered on the arts. Because the council has collaborated with the partnership, so many critical components of our community will be served – economically as well as culturally,”

The Schreiber Anderson team has 25 years of experience helping communities throughout Wisconsin and the Upper Midwest plan and implement vibrant downtowns.

Schreiber Anderson will prepare a comprehensive vision that includes all of the redevelopment districts targeted for development by the partnership’s Economic Restructuring Committee. These districts are:
Arts, Education, and Entertainment District, which is comprised of Windhover Center for the Arts, Children’s Museum of Fond du Lac, Fond du Lac Public Library and the historic Ramada Plaza Hotel and includes several underutilized and vacant properties, including the Historic Retlaw Theatre complex. The vision for this district is to have a thriving environment filled with entertainment, dining and shopping options day and night.
Gateway District: The north entrance to downtown — Johnson and Main streets — is a mix of underutilized properties and inconsistent design. The vision for this district is a cohesive mix of high-traffic businesses blended with an appealing streetscape to establish a welcoming atmosphere as consumers and visitors enter downtown.
River Walk District, located adjacent to the Fond du Lac River and Hamilton Park, which runs throughout downtown. One of the concepts for this district is to redevelop and define properties for family and residential uses, taking advantage of the close proximity to the newly expanded YMCA.

These redevelopment districts have been included in the city’s proposed Downtown Comprehensive Plan. Schreiber Anderson’s work will include concept drawings of each of the three districts and a feasibility study.

On Feb. 16–18, the Schreiber Anderson team will host a Community Immersion Workshop at Windhover Center, which will include several meetings and opportunities for the public to provide input about this important project. For more information regarding these sessions, call the Downtown Fond du Lac Partnership at (920) 921-9500 or the Windhover Center at (920) 921-5410.

High school students in Manitowoc and Calumet counties have the opportunity to become CEOs for a day by participating in the Junior Achievement Business Challenge II, a hands-on, computer-simulated business strategy tournament held at Lakeshore Technical College.

The event will be held on LTC’s Cleveland campus Friday, March 19 from 8 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Teams of two students paired with one area business leader will compete by successfully running their own simulated business, making decisions about product pricing, marketing strategies, inventory levels, and research and development investments.

Winning teams will receive prizes, and the top teams will advance to the Junior Achievement of Wisconsin Statewide Business Challenge in April.

The competition is open to all students in grades nine through 12 living in Manitowoc and Calumet counties. Individuals and teams do not need to be affiliated with a school to participate.

Registration is open until Feb. 26 or until the team roster is filled. To register or for more information, contact LTC High School Liaison Nikki Kiss, (920) 693-1354, nikki.kiss@gotoltc.edu.