Developers plan

industrial-sized boost for

Caledonia

Park will grow nearly eight-fold under proposed

expansion

BY MICHAEL BURKE, The Journal

Times, Wednesday, November 17,

1999

CALEDONIA -- A dramatic expansion of Caledonia Business Park

should help fill an escalating need for industrial park space in Racine

County while boosting the town's tax base.

Those were the reactions Tuesday to the announcement that the business

park is being expanded from about 57 acres to 440 acres. The

developers, Majestic North Development Inc., are the owners of Nielsen

Building Systems and residential developer Ray Leffler.

"This is big news for the town," said Caledonia Town Chairman Dennis

Kornwolf, who welcomed the park expansion's future impact on the tax

base. "The town of Caledonia has had precious few announcements

like this."

David Eberle, chairman of the Racine County Economic

Development Corp., said the increase would help alleviate the

shortage of business park space.

According to the most recent study, at the current rate of

consumption those lands could disappear east of Interstate 94 within

six years.

"This probably should buy us at least two or three years of

expandability in Racine County," Eberle said.

Caledonia Business Park lies between Highway 38 to the east,

Nicholson Road to the west, Dunkelow Road on the south and 4

Mile Road to the north. The developers have been acquiring

adjacent land a chunk at a time for the past few years -- 45 acres

here, 104 there.

The park acreage will surpass 400 when the latest deals, on which

the buyers have accepted offers, close.

While Majestic North had been picking up land parcels, their efforts

to add them to the business park had been stymied by the inability to

get water and sewer to the entire site.

That logjam began to disperse when the town brought those utilities

out Dunkelow Road toward the new joint Caledonia-Mount Pleasant

fire station on Highway K. At that point, developers were able to tap

in and provide the necessary inputs to industrial customers.

"It's taken a long time to get sewer and water," Leffler said. Now,

however, "We're the only sewered and watered business park in

Caledonia," and a bargain at $44,900 per acre, he maintained.

Zoning was never a problem; although the area surrounding the

business park was in farmland, it was zoned M-2, for uses up

through medium industrial.

Already the park has two new occupants, Quick Cable and Midland

Container, bringing the occupancy to eight companies. Developers

said another, Sign Craft, will build there next year, and they have

pending deals with two other Racine area companies.

It's all good news to Kornwolf, who said Caledonia's tax base lags

behind Mount Pleasant's by roughly $300 million.

"The majority of Caledonia is houses," he said. "And houses and

families and people demand more services, and the amount of taxes

we collect from them does not truly reflect the cost of government.

So this will have a balancing effect on our tax base."

But the town will have to invest in its road system in order to handle

the additional traffic on Nicholson and Dunkelow roads, he added.

Eberle also mentioned the transportation issue. He said difficult

access to the park by semi-trailer tractors could hamper the park's

development, but the widening of Highway K has been discussed.

"If Highway K could be expanded to four lanes, that would be a

great contribution," he said. "It's still rather circuitous to get to that

park." The developers hope to negotiate with Union Pacific for a

railroad spur so cargo could be loaded and unloaded within the park.

The developers said they hope to keep adding to the business park.

"I'm pretty sure it will expand," Leffler said. "To what degree I'm not

sure."

"The logical thing," said Bruce Nielsen, a partner in Nielsen Building

Systems, "is someday it will probably go to 4 Mile Road."