Sixteenth Street Community Health Centers gives up on West Milwaukee as site of new clinic
Sixteenth Street Community Health Centers is giving up on its plan to build a clinic in West Milwaukee after being unable to reach an agreement on payments in lieu of property taxes.
The community health center now will look for a new site.
Sixteenth Street — which is exempt from property taxes as a nonprofit organization — offered to pay the village $30,000 a year, said Chris Rasch, director of government and community relations for Sixteenth Street Community Health Centers.
The business on the proposed site now pays $8,157 a year in property taxes.
The Village of West Milwaukee wants a payment of $73,000 to $75,000 a year, Rasch said.
“We offered them what we thought what was a very reasonable and fair proposal,” he said.
But Village President John Stalewski said the current building on the site is very old and cannot be compared with the clinic that Sixteenth Street has proposed.
“We had a policy in place prior to 2016 that there would be a PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes) and these are our terms," Stalewski said, "and they came to the table late.”
The village also did not believe that a clinic would be the best and highest use of the property.
“We just don’t think it would be a good fit for the village,” he said.
The Village of West Milwaukee Board on Aug. 7 declined to approve Sixteenth Street’s request to rezone the site of the proposed clinic at 4603 W. Mitchell St. The move came after the board’s finance committee rejected the community health center’s offer to pay $30,000 a year in lieu of taxes.
West Milwaukee — a total of 1.13 square miles — has a population of 4,200 people.
The clinic was estimated to cost $8 million to $10 million. It would employ 50 people and provide care to more than 12,000 patients a year when fully staffed.
Froedtert Health pledged $12 million for the clinic in May 2015.
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The health system, which planned to build and furnish the clinic, spent several hundred thousand dollars on architects and engineers for the proposed clinic, Rasch said this month.
The area surrounding West Milwaukee was identified as lacking access to health care based on a community health needs assessment and community interviews.
Community health centers, located in low-income urban and rural areas, provide primary, dental and behavioral health care and other services, primarily to patients who are covered by Medicaid programs, such as BadgerCare Plus, and Medicare or who are uninsured.
Sixteenth Street is one of four community health centers in the Milwaukee area.
Sixteenth Street does not pay property taxes on its three clinics in the city of Milwaukee.
The community health center has several other sites that could work for a new clinic, Rasch said.
Those sites will be in the western edge of Milwaukee or in West Allis.
“We definitely are disappointed we couldn’t reach an agreement,” Rasch said.