A boat travels south on Green Bay. PC: Fox 11 Online
GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – Wisconsin is 4th in the nation when it comes to overall boat ownership and 3rd in the nation for non-resident fishing. All great places to be, statistically, except for one problem – there aren’t enough places to dock these boats when their boaters want to come on land.
Fishing and recreational boating is popular in Northeast Wisconsin adding an economic boost to the region.
“We have a huge economy based on the outside world coming in and using our activities. One of the big problems in the state is, there’s not enough places to stop if you’re on a boat. Fishing tournaments bring in 30-75 boats, there was no place in the Greater Green Bay area to park those boats at night and when they all came in,” said Chip McDonald with McDonald Companies.
Thanks to a $1.2 million grant, from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, awarded to McDonald Companies, the owner of Green Bay’s South Bay Marina, an additional 40 boat slips are coming to the area. They’re slips that will be used by transient boaters, rented for a day up to a month.
McDonald Companies is keeping the construction of the docks local, teaming up with the Green Bay Area School District and its Bay Link Manufacturing Program.
“It is a student run manufacturing job shop,” said Andy Belongia, director of the program.
The students working on every aspect of the dock construction, building the components to not only fulfil the dock order but also completing jobs for other companies too.
Belongia said, “This is obviously the largest thing that we’ve ever done in the program. Most of the stuff is smaller machine components for the local companies, things like that. We’ve done some welding work, but nothing on this scale of size and now quantity.”
While the dock expansion will definitely add a boost to the local economy, it’s the students who are building the elements for the project that are benefitting the most.
According to Belongia, “When these companies come to us we’re providing them a service, but they’re really giving these students that real world experience which is crucial to them to really become a manufacturing employee that really anyone would want.”
“My interest is being an electromechanical engineer, robotics engineer so I thought this was the perfect experience to get me more into that field,” added student Aiden Miller-Riesterer.
Work on the docks is just getting underway. It will take several years to complete the full project, but the first slips could be ready to welcome boaters next spring.
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