Rebuilding Marathon County with fewer buildings

How Marathon County — and UWSP — shrunk their footprints and what it could mean for Wausau development

Parks Director Jamie Polley poses at the new Wausau/Marathon County Parks Department office in the UWSP-Wausau Campus.

As I wait at the front desk area of the new home of the Wausau/Marathon County Parks Department, I joke with a guy leaving the front desk. I say I was worried about finding the place since it’s a big campus, but thankfully there were plenty of signs.

The man grunts and says he had a heck of a time finding the place too.

I was surprised by this, but Parks Director Jamie Polley said my reaction — that it was pretty easy to find with all the signs along the way — was rare. Most people are apparently having trouble finding the new parks department offices at the UWSP-Wausau campus.

And if you’ve read this far and are wondering just what the heck the parks department is doing at the UWSP campus, it’s part of a much bigger story - a multi-year plan to look at the entirety of the county’s buildings and see if there could frankly be fewer of them.

The answer, it turns out, was yes. Today the county has fewer buildings than it did five years ago. The Social Services building on Thomas Street is empty, the county’s highway department property on West Street likely will be,¹ and the River Drive buildings along the kayak course - which held not only the Parks Department, but the Conservation, Planning and Zoning Department and Veterans Affairs are now empty as of a month ago.

The latter worked out well because it happened to coincide with another consolidation - and one that The Wausonian reported on before: A task force late last year revealed that UWSP- Wausau was only using a shocking 21% of its campus as enrollments over the years have shrunk from the college’s heyday.

In that story we revealed that UWSP would be looking for new uses to lease the space, and said it would largely focus on education. But that also now includes the city/county parks department.

The Wausonian reached out to UWSP officials about what other organizations might be leasing space at the UWSP campus but did not hear back.

It also means a change from the North Central Health Care campus, which was recently renovated. Now many county offices are located at what is now referred to as the Lake View campus (named after Lake View Drive that creates the southern border of Wausua’s Southeast Side neighborhood).

That also means a shrinking of the North Central Health Care facilities themselves.

It also means new opportunities for higher uses for some of the old county offices. And it creates a somewhat odd situation in which the county will be looking to redevelop some city properties.

As The Wausonian learned in its reporting, that could mean those areas look drastically different in future years.