VERONA, Wis. — A group of residents in the town of Verona is asking neighboring Verona city leaders to reconsider a proposal that would do away with over 140 acres of farmland where the two share a border near County Highway PD.
For the past two years, the Verona Rural Preservation Alliance has been critical of the Ardent Glen development which would bring roughly 400 single-family and twin homes to a stretch of farmland that was annexed by the city of Verona in 2018. The site borders parts of Highway PD and Shady Oak Lane north of the Epic Systems campus.
Group co-director Caryl Owen has lived on Shady Oak Lane for the past two decades. She said their neighborhood won’t be able to meet the needs of an influx of new residents mostly because of how far away they are from the city’s center.
“It goes against all of the best planning and land use that the city itself has in their own guidelines. That can’t and will not ever connect to the city,” she said. “These people will be four miles away in a car-centered community with no public transportation.”
Alliance members have also classified the Ardent Glen project as a high-density neighborhood, so they’re worried about what that would mean for traffic, heat and cooling and water supply.
Verona Mayor Luke Diaz disagrees. He said because they aren’t building apartments or condominiums, he’s not concerned about density.
“I mean it is more dense than town development, but we’re a city,” he said. “We’re not going to put one house on five acres and, you know, see developers charge a million dollars. That’s not an efficient or good use of land.”
Diaz sees the new development as an opportunity to meet the growth Verona has seen in the past few years. He said new jobs, their school district and general economic success have made it so people want to live there, but homes are limited. He added even the ones that are available aren’t affordable for middle-class families.
He also said despite the pushback, the Marty farm is a good place to build because of existing infrastructure in the area that would be easy to expand, which he said was always the goal there.
Alliance members, however, claim the city, in moving forward with the project, isn’t honoring the agreements tit made with the town in 2018 when establishing the development standards for the area, something city leaders have so far written off.
“Some of this stuff is just a mishmash between the city and the town and what town residents want,” Diaz said. “They want to live in the town and that’s fair, but that doesn’t mean they get to dictate what their neighbors do with their property… Ultimately we’re doing our own thing and we’ve been very successful so far in my opinion.”
City leaders said they expect to further develop the area to better meet the needs of new residents but admit other existing landowners would first need to get on board. As far as the Ardent Glen project, they don’t yet have a date to start building but said as long as developer Veridian Homes’ plans remain steady, they’ll keep moving forward.
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