The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Water tower saved from salvage fate
After nearly five years in limbo, the future is looking brighter for a dilapidated water tower at the Interstate 90/State Route 528 interchange in Madison Village.
The 90-year-old, 128-foot structure has finally found salvation at the doorstep of dismemberment, thanks to one Lake County official’s vision and the cooperation of the village it calls home and four Northeast Ohio organizations.
Even before he began in June as the Lake County Visitors Bureau’s executive director, Scott Dockus said he’s been intrigued by the old tower, which has become a landmark for travelers along I-90 over the years.
So, after reading a July News-Herald article on its fate, Dockus said he approached Madison Village Administrator Dwayne Bailey about working together on a renewed effort to save it.
At the time, Bailey had just confirmed Madison Village Council gave the community until October to raise the roughly $40,000 necessary to get the tower a new paint job, which would essentially keep it from being torn down.
“I called Dwayne, introduced myself and said ‘don’t tear it down. I want to do something with it,” said Dockus, whose passion for historical preservation is one of the driving forces behind his mission for the Visitors Bureau. “We met two days later and I said I wanted dibs on it and not to tear it down. He said the village needed someone to kind of sponsor the project because, while the community did raise some money for its restoration, it wasn’t enough.”
The leaking water tower was disconnected from the village’s water system in 2013, then council took a year to try and find a new purpose for the iconic structure.
Over the next year, Village Councilmen Duane Frager and Mark Vest, both co-chairs of the village’s now-defunct Economic Development Advisory Group, had tried soliciting interest with businesses, vineyards and nonprofit groups, but the efforts landed no prospects, Vest said in a 2014 News-Herald article.
Nearly a year and one failed crowd sourcing campaign later, the tower’s future seemed dim.
“Barring any ninth-inning rally, which I’m not aware of, it’s going to come down,” Bailey said in a 2015 News-Herald article.
He said then that its condition was becoming more and more of a liability and the $30,000 it would have cost at the time to refurbish it would be better used to fix roadways and maintain other existing infrastructure in need of attention.
“It’s a painful issue, like anything historical,” he said. “No one wants to give it up. It’s a popular part of town. It’s a landmark on I 90 that people from all over use.”
But, he said, it’s also becoming more and more of a risk as time, and the structure’s condition, slip by the wayside.
“It’s just a huge liability,” he said, adding that its proximity to I-90 and overhead power lines, among other things, made it a potential catastrophe waiting to happen.
“It’s become a business decision,” he said.
At that point, Bailey said the village and the contractors who would have done the demolition work were just waiting for winter to come and freeze the ground on which the tower sits, as it tends to be too wet to get the job done safely otherwise.
But, as fate would have it, the warm winter wound up buying the tower some more time and, by August 2016, the tower still stood and, as a result, had been given another chance to stay upright.
“The reason it’s still standing is that the contractor we had a deal with to take it down wanted to wait until the ground around it was frozen, because the area where they need to drop it is pretty wet,” Bailey said in an Aug. 8, 2016, interview. “So, what wound up happening was, we were working with different property owners adjacent to it to get proper access to it and that took a little longer than we thought.”
He said that, as a result, the village was unable to coordinate with the contractor’s schedule and have it taken down.
“That gave us an additional opportunity to try to explore other options with it,” he said, adding that they thought they had one but, because of regulations set forth through Federal Outdoor Advertising Control standards, the potential advertising they had lined up couldn’t go up.
He said the deal would have generated enough to cover the estimated $40,000 bill to get an initial coat of paint on the structure but, because it’s a “nonconforming advertising device,” Madison Village couldn’t get permission to go ahead with that option.
“So we found out from ODOT that there’s no wiggle room on off-premises advertising,” he said, adding that, if a business owned the land on which the tower stands, it could use it as marquee ad space. But assuming ownership of that plot isn’t a small undertaking. “I actually talked to the folks at Pizza Roto (which occupies an adjacent property) about buying it. But it’s a heavy responsibility...”
The Lake County Visitors Bureau’s Dockus said he and Bailey in July discussed the value of the tower as not just an iconic landmark, but as the focal point of a kind of regional welcome station for folks traveling to enjoy any of the region’s many attractions.
He said plans remain on the drawing board, literally, but that collaborators, including the Lake County Visitors Bureau, Madison Community Improvement Corporation
Ashtabula County Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Grand River Valley Marketing Initiative, are each planning to cover a quarter of the tower’s $42,000 restoration bill, which Bailey said will include rust mitigation, an antifungal treatment and a new paint job.
The collaboration also plans to involve area nurseries, Auburn Career Center and other Northeast Ohio entities in the design and implementation of a parklike green space area beneath the tower, which will serve as a signpost that will feature informational postings about area attractions around Lake County, Madison Village, the Grand River Valley, Ashtabula County and other regional offerings.
Everyone involved agrees the timing couldn’t be better, too. With the impending construction of two hotels in Madison Village on Water Tower Drive, just west of the tower, along with numerous other economic development initiatives within the village and around Lake and Ashtabula counties, the water tower project seems to have landed in an ideal location in the space-time continuum.
“The timing of it worked out really well,” Bailey said. “The forward thinking of Mr. Dockus really got the ball rolling. He had some really good ideas and I think we have a really good plan.”
Stephanie Siegel, executive director of the Ashtabula County Convention and Visitors Bureau agreed, citing the truly regional nature of the plan.
“It really is one of the gateways - the western gateway, in fact - of the Grand River Valley,” she said in a Jan. 25 phone interview. “It was met with a lot of excitement and optimism.”
She said she thinks the project will be a boon to tourism efforts around the region and considers the I 90/Route 528 interchange the perfect example of one of its “front doors.”
“We always think of the corridors along the interstate as being seen as our front doors and you want people to get off the interstate there,” she said. “That’s what we really need to do: look at our front doors as gateways and make them attractive. So, yeah, we definitely want to be a part of any of this kind of fowardmoving momentum.”
If all goes according to plan, Bailey said the tower paint job could be as soon as spring.