Five neighboring commercial land owners in the Village of Little Chute faced a dilemma: If any one of them wanted to expand their business, they would first have to cough up funds to build a dry pond for drainage.
The prospect was daunting for the small business owners — enough to make them doubt the ROI on expanding. As explained by Little Chute Administrator James Fenlon, not only would it cost them, but the time it could take to coordinate their efforts, obtain approvals, contract for the work and see it to fruition would have resulted in lost opportunities.
Fortuitously, a solution to such a complicated development problem had been in the works and was at last ready for prime time. McMahon Group, based in Neenah, had buttoned up plans to launch a new division for the design-build engineering and architectural firm, Integrated Public Resources.
To cut to the chase: IPR helped the Little Chute land owners find an alternative solution that was much less costly — and completed within three months.
“For the village, we would have been put in the position where we would have had to work around our five-year capital improvement plan, and in terms of other priorities it would have been a non-starter,” Fenlon says. “Any one single property owner wouldn’t have been able to do it. IPR facilitates the whole deal.”
As a public-private partnership firm, IPR was developed to help municipalities and developers find creative solutions to design, build, finance, own, operate or maintain projects that might otherwise never get done, IPR Project Manager TJ Lamers explains. It draws on the engineering expertise of McMahon Group, which includes wastewater treatment plant upgrades or construction, new roads, new park facilities, lift station additions or rehabs and more.
Public-private partnerships aren’t new, says Fenlon, but awareness of such creative solutions has yet to catch on in the Midwest.
McMahon President Denny Lamers says the concept is widespread in Europe and Canada but when he introduces the idea to clients he often hears, “It’s too good to be true.” He explains that because of the work McMahon does with municipal wastewater treatment plants — many of which were built in the 1980s and now require upgrades — his company has had to find ways for its municipal clients to maintain, overhaul or rebuild their systems in the face of budget restrictions. One solution is for McMahon to buy the plants from communities, allowing them to finance the upgrades or tackle other municipal projects. Working with financial advisors from Baker Tilly and legal advisors from Herrling Clark, they can tailor solutions to a wide variety of projects, big and small.
The Little Chute project, at a cost of about $150,000, was small — especially considering that many projects McMahon soon expects to deploy with IPR involve complete overhauls of wastewater treatment plants and bio-digesters — but it proved effective. It came to McMahon through Nick Van De Hey, a McMahon engineer who had coordinated projects for Little Chute in the past. He proposed instead of a dry pond, which would have severely limited land use for the five property owners, that the owners collaborate on the installation of a water pipe. Offering to help the owners finance their share allowed the project to be completed quickly.
Now, one of the businesses is ready to add 14,000 square feet to his building, along with new hires. Another plans to expand by 10,000 square feet.
“I don’t know if you can even put a value of how great it is that in three months the project was done,” Fenlon says. “That’s a win-win-win for everyone.”
Public-private partnerships, depending on the level of involvement of a firm like IPR, may not work in every instance, Lamers admits, and Fenlon agrees. But they do open the door to expediting developments that may be stymied by governmental processes, regulations or lack of funding.
“This project just skims the surface as to what other realm is possible,” Fenlon says. “A lot of great things could be done with this kind of model.”
See the work in progress
For a time-lapse look at the recent Little Chute storm water project coordinated by IPR, a division of McMahon Group, go to YouTube and search “McMahon Group, Integrated Public Resources.”
Online, click here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQh8EOmtADA
