Board chair discusses future of 111 acre, county-owned farmland ahead of Wed. meeting

The next move in planning the future of 111 acres of county land near West Salem could be made during an 8 a.m. Wednesday meeting of the La Crosse County Executive Committee.

At 8 a.m., the panel will review ideas from three groups for developing the old county farm site near Lake Neshonoc.

On WIZM’s La Crosse Talk, La Crosse County Board chair Tina Tryggestad discussed the process and noted things are really in the early stages.

La Crosse Talk airs weekdays at 6-8 a.m. Listen on the WIZM app, online here, or on 92.3 FM / 1410 AM / 106.7 FM (north of Onalaska). Find all the podcasts here or subscribe to La Crosse Talk wherever you get your podcasts.

“We are in the very early stages, that there’s still a lot of questions, there’s still a lot of details that we need to explore, and map out what we’d like to see happen,” Tryggestad said.

Much of the attention has gone to a plan to develop a new concert venue for Country Boom, along with hundreds of homes to be built over a period of several years.

However, the county also has invited the Ho-Chunk Nation to offer a plan. The School District of West Salem and the village government also have interest in the land.

The executive committee is expected to review information received by the board this week on possible uses for about 100 acres of land along the lakeshore.

Tryggestad noted there’s no definite plan yet from the Ho-Chunk.

She said at Monday’s meeting, the Ho-Chunk representatives “were bombarded with, in mostly a nice way, questions on … ‘What are you going to do with the land?’ And they very much were like, ‘Well, we haven’t made that plan yet because we’re still in the early stages of discussing it.'”

The committee may also vote to support including Phase II of the Prairie Spring Science Center at UW-La Crosse in the state budget.

The building has been voted down by Republicans for seven years, after the project got split and Phase I was then built.