The Fond du Lac city manager is recommending the city council does not approve a binding agreement drafted by a business group for a Lakeside Park alternate master plan. City manager Joe Moore says there are a number of areas in the agreement that are unanswered. Moore says the agreement doesn’t specify what the city’s financial commitment would be or what would happen if a restaurant in the park would fail and says the other concern is the ownership of the properties. Under the agreement Moore says city taxpayers would be liable for any cost beyond the $5.2 million commitment from Lakeside Forward. The first dollars would go toward a restaurant on the lighthouse peninsula, followed by a walking path and finally an amphitheater on Oven Island. “If it (business donations) could cover the entire cost of the walking paths it would, if it wouldn’t then the city would take leadership on that, essentially cap off the entire remaining funding. We would then move into the amphitheater. The city would be funding that if the donated funds have been exhausted by that point,” Moore told WFDL news. Moore says the city typically spends months working on agreements like this. He says he first saw the agreement last week. “Typically we have procedures that deal with this whether we’re talking about a deal with the Retlaw, (Hotel) the mall, or companies around town when we’re doing tax incremental financing. We typically spend months doing our work to develop those agreements so that at the end of the process, when we come to the table, the signing of those agreements is almost an afterthought.”
