A decision made by the city of Sheboygan Plan Commission last November continues to reverberate among opponents of Kohler Company’s plan for a new golf course – its fifth – on the Lake Michigan shore.
The Plan Commission, chaired by Sheboygan’s mayor, Ryan Sorenson, voted unanimously with one abstention to extend the conditional use permit (CUP) it granted Kohler Company in 2020 to build the golf course on Kohler land annexed by the City of Sheboygan. However, many contend that Kohler’s original plan is no longer valid, a point ignored by the Plan Commission in extending the CUP.
Since the meeting last November, Friends of the Black River Forest, the local group leading opposition to the golf course, along with a group of residents that includes Roger Miller and Erik Thelen, sent formal appeals to Sheboygan’s Zoning Board of Appeals objecting to the CUP extension. Sheboygan’s city attorney, Charles (Chuck) Adams, summarily dismissed the appeals, telling the groups they should take their objections to the courts.
Miller’s group called Adams’ bluff. On the last day of January 2025, they filed a complaint in Sheboygan County Circuit Court.
While the November meeting was a clear representation of what is at stake for residents, it also illustrates the tendency of city officials (generally, not just in Sheboygan) to be strong believers in development at all costs.
In this case, the cost will be Kohler-Andrae Lakeshore, a rare and valuable ecosystem that consists of both Kohler-Andrae State Park (KASP) and the site of the proposed golf course on Kohler land due north and adjacent to the park. Kohler-Andrae Lakeshore is an annual stopover site for 10,000 migrating birds and the permanent home of hundreds of species, including some that are threatened or endangered and will be further threatened by the clear-cutting of the old-growth forest on the Kohler land.
Representing Kohler at that meeting, Debbie Tomczyk, a land use, zoning law, and real estate lawyer with Reinhart Boerner Van Deuren in Milwaukee, told the assembled group of citizens and commission members that out of seven lawsuits filed against Kohler over the proposed golf course, only one was decided against the company.
That decision, based on a lawsuit brought by FBRF, revoked Kohler’s wetlands fill permit and was upheld by Wisconsin’s Court of Appeals, a point Tomczyk failed to mention, though she did admit that the decision, “necessitates some kind of re-permitting or plan change.”
A document Kohler Company submitted to the Plan Commission prior to the November meeting showed limited changes to the original golf course plan, which included the location of a 22,000 sq, ft. golf course maintenance facility on a wetland inside KASP. According to the updated information submitted to the commission, the maintenance facility would now be located on the Kohler land north of the park.
Besides its rejection by the courts, another likely reason for changes to the plan is that there has been significant erosion to the 247 acres where Kohler wants to build the new golf course. Some of those acres are likely now under water. At the November meeting, Sheboygan County resident Roger Miller, an environmental engineer, said the proposed “greens and tees [have become] beach and lakebed. The high-water mark is 120 feet west of where it was shown” by the original plan.
Remarkably, Tomczyk told commissioners that “there is no change, no amendment in front of you today. We’re not proposing anything different than what was considered and approved in 2020.”
However, in a December 16, 2024 interview with Wisconsin Law Journal, Mayor Sorenson—who voted in favor of the CUP extension—admitted that he had met with Kohler officials months earlier and that they showed him plans for a redesigned golf course. Thus far, Kohler has not submitted these new plans to the Plan Commission.
“But (Kohler) showed me the plan,” Sorenson told Wisconsin Law Journal. “City officials met with Kohler, and they showed us their whole new plan.”
A redesigned project would require a new CUP, and a new CUP would require public hearings, an inconvenient fact for both the Plan Commission and Kohler Company. Yet, despite the mayor’s admission that Kohler had redesigned the project, Tomczyk stated at the meeting that “there is no new evidence to be presented here other than our time request.” Rather than mentioning the existence of the new plan or pressing for transparency, Sorenson remained silent and simply asked whether the company needed more time for the project.
Prior to Tomczyk’s remarks, City Attorney Adams had laid the groundwork for the approval vote when he told the commissioners that they were not voting on the course plan, which, according to him, had not changed.
“You are required to grant conditional use permits when those permits fit within the guidelines that are in the city’s code and state statutes. Here you [the Plan Commission] have made that determination already,” Adams said. “Today, you can’t make a decision on the site plan or those kinds of things. The only thing you can consider is, is there a basis for not extending the conditional use permit because it goes against the interests of the city as published already in the code.”
The Plan Commission’s granting of the original CUP in 2020 has already met with stubborn opposition in the community based on its overall environmental impact. Kohler’s wetland mitigation permit was originally revoked by an administrative law judge for the DNR. That revocation was upheld in Sheboygan County Circuit Court and later by Wisconsin’s Court of Appeals.
But last November, when Adams told the Plan Commission that “realistically, you don’t have much authority” to deny the extension, Plan Commission members seemed eager to comply. John Belanger, a Sheboygan alderman as well as a Kohler Company employee, said, “I have seen the genesis of this project and would like to see it through.” Belanger praised the late Herb Kohler Jr’s “vision” for the project, the last designed by famed golf course designer Pete Dye.
One voice in opposition to the project was summarily dismissed. When Professor Belle Rose Ragins, a faculty member at UW-Milwaukee’s Lubar School of Business, asked to be heard, Mayor Sorenson became emotional and shouted “No! No! No!” Ragins was prevented from attending the meeting in person due to a disability, but she asserted that she had received permission to participate via Zoom from another official, Ellise Rose, an associate planner with the city of Sheboygan. According to Ragins, the Americans with Disabilities Act guaranteed her right to testify remotely.
However, Sorenson refused to hear Ragins, insisting that only those physically present at the meeting would be heard. Ragins has been an outspoken opponent of the golf course because the proposed location is the site of Native American burial mounds. Human remains thousands of years old have been found at the site.
Present and allowed to speak were several members of Friends of the Black River Forest (FBRF), the Sierra Club-supported grassroots group that brought the lawsuit resulting in the wetlands fill permit revocation.
Claudia Bricks of FBRF requested that the Plan Commission demand a new set of plans from the company and hold public hearings about them. “From what I have heard,” Bricks said, “Kohler has significantly changed” its original golf course plans, so much so that it “should be considered . . . a new project.”
Bricks added a touch of poetry to the meeting when she “strongly urged” commissioners to “go walk the land. Look at the forest. Imagine all the wildlife that inhabits these acres when humans are not around. Watch the birds come and go. Breathe in the fresh air. Walk by the shores of Lake Michigan and feel the grandeur of this Great Lake. . . Now I want you to imagine that you erase all that. Imagine half of the beautiful old-growth forest cut down, the magnificent dunes scraped down and bulldozed so that grass can be planted, and the lake burdened with toxic residue of herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizer. Enjoy the view because it may be the last time you or anyone else get[s] to see it unless you pay for a round of golf costing about $500.”
Bricks also pointed out that the Kohler land is “a mirror image of KASP, as both were part of the original 500-acre parcel” donated to the state by the Kohler family “for public use [italics mine] in 1965.” She added, “I encourage commission members to scrutinize this arrangement with Kohler before making any decisions. There is more here than meets the eye.”
FBRF’s leader, Mary Faydash, also spoke at the meeting. She claimed that Sheboygan residents “have never been told the truth about how Kohler’s golf course plan would impact them financially, now or in the future.” Faydash said that “economic benefits to the state” from the golf course “were accepted without being verified.” Instead, Kohler’s “economic data has been repeated, unaltered, for 12 years.”
Using data generated by Edgewood College professor Steven Davis, Faydash pointed out that KASP is one of 4 parks whose revenue supports the entire state park system.
“Kohler’s business plan has shown no concern about altering the experience of this park for campers and visitors [or for] altering the beach quality or air quality of the park. [The company] continues its plan to irreparably alter a rare ecosystem because it can,” Faydash said.
Referring to a proposed 4-lane road plus rotary at KASP’s entrance, Faydash said, “Instead of using its own land for ingress and egress of its golf course,” Kohler Company “chose our public land.”
Faydash also emphasized the rise in air pollution that would result from the proposed golf course. “There have been no Kohler statements on how the company will alleviate the instant production of ground level ozone created by hundreds of diesel machines operating during construction and ongoing maintenance of a . . . golf course,” she said. This section of the lake front, Faydash said, already has “the highest level of ozone pollution in our state.” She added that “FBRF is proud that we have held off this ground-level pollution for 12 years, as well as preventing millions and millions of pounds of pesticides and fertilizer from flowing into our groundwater and Lake Michigan.”
Faydash concluded, “We will continue our work.”
By RT Both
This article originally appeared on https://wiscoland.wordpress.com/