GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – Big plans are in the works on the UW-Green Bay campus, as the university pairs with Brown County to push forward a new innovation park.
Building out the Phoenix Innovation Park is an idea that has been talked about for a few years but appears to have gained recent steam. A major goal with the new development is to double the school’s enrollment.
“It’s really looking at how do we take 70 acres of land at the university and how do we build density,” said Brown County Executive Troy Streckenbach.
Three years after the successful partnership between Brown County and the UW-System opened the STEM Innovation Center on the UW-Green Bay campus, there’s hope of replicating that recipe with the innovation park plans.
“What we want to do is work with the system to make sure that we can develop the land at a speed of what normal private sector operates within,” said Streckenbach.
To make the STEM Center a reality, the county leased the land from the UW-System. It’s looking at potentially doing the same to develop the Phoenix Innovation Park.
According to a vision statement for the park, its academic pillars would be in water science, advanced manufacturing as well as sports ecosystem and event management.
“Right now, we’re just building the foundation, the infrastructure to come alive, and then it will be the private sector that makes it work,” said Streckenbach.
University leaders believe this plan also needs to address the top reason prospective students do not choose to come to UW-Green Bay, and that is the campus doesn’t have everything on it, forcing students to go off campus for certain needs and amenities.
“Things like childcare, things like restaurants, these sorts of things to be able to make the campus a place where they want to stay, learn, be a resource for the community,” said UW-Green Bay Chancellor Michael Alexader.
At a state of Brown County economic development event on Wednesday afternoon, Streckenbach told developers and municipal leaders this idea could double UW-Green Bay’s enrollment over the next 20 years. With a 70% retention rate for graduates, it would be an additional 7,000 workers for Northeast Wisconsin per year.
“The university was envisioned to have 20,000 people in it,” said Alexander.
“It took us 57 years to get to 10,000, and we’ve now grown for seven straight years, the first time in the university’s history and against all the trends that are happening in our region and across the Midwest. What that shows us is that there is the infrastructure and the potential for the university to reach that 20,000 number.”
How fast that happens is largely dependent on how much buy in the county and university sees from the private sector for the innovation park. So far, they say they have seen plenty of it.
