January 2025 cannot come soon enough if you want to see the Potawatomi State Park Observation Tower saved and it is something State Rep. Joel Kitchens and State Sen. Andre Jacque know too. The pair of local legislators that represent Door and Kewaunee counties wrote an open letter to Governor Tony Evers requesting that he immediately direct the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to stabilize and repair the Potawatomi State Park Observation Tower with emergency repair funds utilized by the State Building Commission. Under commission policy, the governor could immediately authorize $500,000 to be used to help save the structure for the immediate future.
Preserving the tower did make the governor’s list of projects for the State Building Commission that he released on February 28th. The governor budgeted just over $6 million to rehabilitate the current Potawatomi State Park Observation Tower and build a helical ramp to make it more handicap accessible. According to the governor’s timeline, the tower would not see any stabilization until January 2025. Kitchens and Jacque contend that by then, it may be too late to save the structure. They cite a poll that says 94 percent of the 647 completed surveys wish to restore the historic tower immediately with local officials in Door County passing resolutions asking the state to follow suit.
According to the DNR, 257 of the 488 respondents to a January survey favored repairing or restoring the tower and 341 of them preferred the helical ramp structure over the linear ramp used at Eagle Tower inside Peninsula State Park. Local state officials and groups oppose the ramp structure, advocating for restoring just the tower to save money and to provide immediate relief to the observation that is on both the National and State Register of Historic Places. The Sturgeon Bay Historical Society and the Potawatomi Park Alliance pushed a second survey that included a “restore only” option.
You can read the full letter from Jacque and Kitchens by clicking this link.
