Leader Offers Bold Vision for Renewing Historic Harbor Area

Lilith Fowler says she is “a fixer-upper” type of person. That’s true whether she’s dealing with a home or a neighborhood – or big challenges that can have impact on an entire metropolitan area. A few years ago, she was the first executive director of Menomonee Valley Partners, a non-profit that played a valuable role in the revitalization of a big swatch of land near the heart of the city.

She has taken on a new challenge: Catalyzing a boom in the area around Milwaukee’s harbor, about 1,000 acres that is in large part unused or underused now, with many environmental challenges. The area can roughly be described as lying on either side of the southern stretch of the Hoan Bridge. The goal is to bring to the area the kind of appealing development that has come to nearby areas such as the Third Ward and Bay View.

In an “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” program in the Lubar Center of Eckstein Hall on Thursday, Fowler, executive director of Harbor District, Inc., a new and still-small non-profit, summarized the state of the area now (pretty used up) and offered visions, both in words and slides, of what the area could be (pretty beautiful, with a lot of river walks and promenades, as well as mixed commercial and residential development).

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Don’t Laugh — Millennial Leader Serious About Easing Political Polarization

You didn’t need to go further than the opening moments of the “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” program in the Lubar Center at Eckstein Hall on Tuesday to grasp the challenge his guest for the day has taken on.

Gousha was introducing Steven Olikara, founder and president of the Millennial Action Project. “They’re hoping, sort of, to re-establish political cooperation,” Gousha said. That brought an audible snicker from a member of the audience, which brought a larger laugh from the group. “This is a cynical, cynical group,” Gousha said, with a laugh. Olikara responded, “That’s OK, my parents laughed, too.”

But Olikara is serious about it and he exuded confidence that improvement in the tone of American politics will come. 

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On the Issues: WEDC Chief Praises Foxconn Plan as “Transformational”

Transformational. That was the word that Mark Hogan, secretary and CEO of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, used often on Thursday during an “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” program. Hogan was describing the impact he expects to result from Foxconn, a high-tech megacorporation, building a huge plant in Racine County where it will make liquid crystal display equipment.

Hogan endorsed and defended every aspect of the agreement between Foxconn and state and local governments, from its cost – expected to total well over $3 billion in public expenses – to the plant’s environmental impact to what benefit Foxconn will bring to people in northern Wisconsin to the availability of workers to transportation issues connected to the plant to the political process that led to approving the deal to the precedent it might set for supporting other economic development ideas.

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