A sigh of relief as the first ground is broken on the old mall site

The twists and turns of Wausau's mall redevelopment project

“It’s been five years,” the CEO of the Wausau Area Chamber of Commerce, Dave Eckmann, said to me Thursday evening.

The look on Eckmann’s face - and frankly, on the face of just about everyone present on the patch of dirt where the Wausau Center mall once stood — was one of relief.

Terrence Wall, owner of T. Wall Enterprises, was downright jovial as he addressed the gathered crowd, which included a few council members, city staff, bank executives and only one other reporter besides yours truly. They were about to break ground on the first development project to go up on the site where the city’s declining shopping mall stood until 2021.

That’s because the road from a project began five years ago in 2019 when a pair of non-profit entities approached the city with a proposal to team up to buy the mall, preventing it from what they said were venture capitalists ready to strip down the mall for parts like a corporate chop shop. (That turned out to not exactly be true - a later city memo detailed a plan by one of the firms to turn the mall into an indoor go-kart park among other things.)

The city ponied up $1 million into what would be a multi-year, contentious process that had Wall calling for council member’s resignations and behind-the-scenes shouting matches. Former Mayor Katie Rosenberg once told me she was eager for me to see Wall’s emails to her and Community Development Director Liz Brodek. (I had requested those emails and have yet to receive them; I reached out on Friday to check on the status of that request.)

The project covers three mayors. Mayor Doug Diny spoke Thursday evening to a crowd that included three council members — including Tom Neal, who had left and returned to the city council in the time this project was pending. No one mentioned Robert Mielke, the mayor in charge when the city made the $1 million commitment; or Rosenberg, who led a reconfiguration of the mall deal to put a little more onus on Wausau Opportunity Zone and who bore the brunt of the frustration growing between the community tired of seeing a Kosovo-like industrial wasteland where the mall once stood and the antics of Wall, who had threatened to sue the city over a previous development on the RiverLife area.

So when Wall joked about a key to the city, the rejoinder that such an honor would only come after the building was finished may have been only partially in jest.

How The Wausonian got the scoop

It’s actually still surprising to me that The Wausonian got the scoop on this since something of this magnitude would be expected to be a pretty large event.

The fact is, it came down to some good old fashion gumshoe reporting.