Oconomowoc's $12M Entertainment Complex Puts Waukesha Retailers On Alert

WAUKESHA — The Oconomowoc Common Council voted 6-1 last Tuesday to approve The Social, a $12 million entertainment complex slated for the former Olympia ski hill site off Valley Road, and by Thursday morning at least one Waukesha business owner had already run the numbers on what a 15-minute drive can do to a Saturday.

The Social's site plan calls for an 18-hole mini golf course laid out around the hill's old chairlift towers, a two-story rope course, four inflatable bounce pillows, and a 340-seat food court anchored by a corn dog stand and a frozen custard counter. Developers project 250,000 visits in the complex's first year, with parking for 900 vehicles and, per the approved plan, a single shared entrance off Highway 16.

Brad Richardson, 48, who owns the Culver's franchise on Frame Park Avenue in downtown Waukesha, said he began fielding questions from other business owners within a day of the vote. His own estimate, which he shared unprompted and repeated twice, is that a successful opening season could cost his restaurant 15 to 20 percent of its Saturday lunch crowd.

"We could lose 15-20% of our Saturday lunch crowd."

— Brad Richardson, Culver's franchise owner

"People are already choosing between us and the drive-thru at the Pewaukee location," Richardson said. "Now I've got a water slide 15 minutes the other direction. That's not a competitor I can put a coupon against."

The Commerce Department's Math

Waukesha's Commerce Department reviewed the Oconomowoc project at the request of two downtown business associations and concluded, in a two-page memo circulated Thursday, that The Social's draw radius likely extends well past Waukesha County, with the potential to pull family outing traffic from as far as Milwaukee. Commerce Department analyst Renata Fields, who authored the memo, said the concern isn't that Waukesha loses visitors it currently has, but that it never sees a share of visitors who would otherwise have continued past Oconomowoc on Highway 16 toward downtown and Frame Park.

"Right now, if a family's headed our way, they pass Oconomowoc to get here," Fields said. "This gives them a reason to stop 15 minutes short and just turn around. We don't lose the customer. We just never get introduced."

Fields' memo estimated the effect at "difficult to quantify precisely, but directionally negative," a phrase two separate downtown merchants repeated back to this reporter without apparent irony.

Fifteen Minutes, Both Ways

The 15-minute figure has become the story's load-bearing detail, cited by Richardson, by Fields, and by Councilman Gary Puchalski, who raised the complex at Tuesday's Waukesha Common Council meeting despite it falling outside city jurisdiction. Puchalski noted that 15 minutes is also, coincidentally, the average delay downtown drivers face when a freight train holds the Broadway crossing, meaning a Waukesha family weighing a trip to The Social must budget for the possibility of losing the same 15 minutes twice, once each direction, without ever seeing a bounce pillow.

"I'm not saying don't build it," Puchalski said. "I'm saying our residents drive to Oconomowoc, wait behind our own train to leave town, then wait behind their train to get out of the parking lot. At some point that's just a research trip."

Downtown boutique owners along West Main Street, several of whom have carried "closing sale" signage in their windows for periods exceeding two years, said they were watching the project's opening date but declined to characterize it as an emergency. "We've survived the one-ways, we've survived the train, we'll survive the mini golf," said one shop owner who asked that her business not be named for a story about a competitor's mini golf course.

What Happens Next

The Social's developers have not announced an opening date beyond a target of "next summer." Richardson said he intends to track the complex's progress and has already discussed extending his Saturday hours to compete, though he acknowledged the Culver's corporate franchise agreement limits how aggressively he can discount a ButterBurger in response to a rope course.

Fields said the Commerce Department has no formal recommendation at this time beyond continuing to monitor the situation, and confirmed that no city dollars are being considered to counter-program against a rival municipality's water slide.