Agreement on Aurora's Summit plan reached

The Daily Reporter, August 18, 2006

By Sean Ryan
sean.ryan@dailyreporter.com

The city of Oconomowoc and Aurora Health Care have agreed to begin an atypical zoning process to gain approval for Auroras plan to build a hospital in Summit.

The process, known as extraterritorial zoning, will allow Aurora and the town of Summit to bypass the Waukesha County Board, which in April 2005 voted against rezoning a site in the Pabst Farms development for Auroras $85 million hospital project. Summit, as a town, needs county approval for the zoning change, but extraterritorial zoning would allow Oconomowoc to rezone the property in Summit without any additional review.

Oconomowocs Common Council on Tuesday approved a memorandum of understanding with Aurora to cooperate in the process. The agreement will end a legal dispute between the two parties over Auroras attempts, first made in 2001, to build its hospital in Oconomowocs jurisdiction of Pabst Farms. A Waukesha County Circuit Court on May 25 ruled that the citys attempt to rezone that property to block the hospital project was illegal, and the city leaders in early June vowed to appeal that ruling.

This is something that came up recently in the settlement discussion, Aurora spokesman Jeff Squire said about the rezoning plan. When we are able to do that, the litigation will be history.

Squire said Aurora, which pursued the Summit site since April 2004, shifted gears after the May court ruling to again try to build in Oconomowoc. But, less than one month later, General Growth Properties Inc. and Pabst Farms announced plans to build a 1 million-square-foot, open-air shopping center on the same location. The agreement will also untangle that snag.

It works out well for all parties, Squire said.

Extraterritorial zoning is usually used when cities and villages are considering annexing land, said Summit Town Planner and Manager Henry Elling. But thats not an issue since the two municipalities have a deal in which Summit will give Oconomowoc 1,000 acres of land, mostly in Pabst Farms, by 2010 and the city will never annex Summits land again.

It does not happen very frequently at all, Elling said. We did mention it to the Aurora group back in 2004 when they first submitted their application.

However, the agreement to begin an extraterritorial zoning process does not guarantee approval for the rezoning in Summit. The two municipalities will next form a commission with three representatives from the Oconomowoc Plan Commission and three from Summit to make a recommendation on the rezoning. Four of the six members must approve the plan. After that, the Oconomowoc Common Council will have the final say on the rezoning recommendation.

Elling said the process could take three to four months and, after its complete, the town would have to approve the hospitals design. The town would also have to sign off on an offer Aurora made to give the town payments in lieu of taxes, Elling said. The deal that Aurora proposed in 2004 would require it to give the town $2.7 million before it gets an occupancy permit for the hospital, plus annual payments for fire, police and public works services.

But some preliminary earth-moving work could begin before that since Pabst Farms has already received a grading permit for the site from Summit, Elling said.