Thursday, December 13, 2018 • Vol. 134, No. 24 • Oregon, WI • ConnectOregonWI.com • $1.25
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Oregon Observer The
Oregon School District
Land buys approved Fitchburg elementary school project going to bid in early 2019 SCOTT DE LARUELLE Unified Newspaper Group
The plans are approved, the land is set to be purchased, and the students will soon be on the way. Now, it’s time to starting building a new school. A special, sparsely attended meeting of electors before the regular Oregon school board meeting Monday night unanimously approved a pair of district land purchases stemming from the Nov. 6 referendums. The district will purchase around 106 acres (street address 4930 County M) and around 1 acre (street address 1772 County MM) in Fitchburg for $926,080 for a planned middle school; and will spend around $2.1 million for around 12 acres in the Terravessa development
along County MM in the City of Fitchburg for a planned K-6 elementary school to open in fall 2020. The district will also spend $250,000 for road development for the elementary school. Board members later unanimously approved the purchases at their meeting. “This sets us up really well for our future planning and creates a great flexibility,” said board president Steve Zach. “We can undertake the appropriate steps to purchase that land.” District superintendent Brian Busler, speaking before the votes, said the elementary school site, near the Lacy Road interchange, is near a nature conservancy that will be deeded to the City of Fitchburg, which will provide some “natural connections to our environmental programs throughout the district.” “The district will have conservancy space
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Photo by Justin Loewen
Zoe, 3, Oregon, and Trevor Bell Richard pose for a picture with Santa Claus at the 10th annual K-9 Breakfast with Santa.
Ringing in the season Members of the Oregon community gathered at the Oregon Area EMS/Fire District building on 131 Spring St. over the weekend to meet Santa Claus and eat some breakfast on Saturday, Dec. 8. The all-you-can-eat event served the usual breakfast fixings, including pancakes, eggs and sausage. There was also a bake sale, with proceeds going to the Oregon Police Department K-9 unit. OPD Sgt. Dave Elsner said the event raised $3,100, with $786 coming from the bake sale alone. – Emilie Heidemann
Inside More K-9 breakfast photos Page 7
Taxes up $109 on Oregon School District average home A greener future at OMS hoop house ALEXANDER CRAMER Unified Newspaper Group
The average home in the Village of Oregon will be taxed about $109 more this year than in 2017, about half of last year’s nearly $200 increase. But because home revaluations vary year to year, some homeowners will pay much less and others will pay more. The village compiled its
taxes last week with the hope of getting them in the mail early this week. Including state credits, 2018 property taxes on the average home in the village, increasing by the average amount, will be $5,232, compared with $5,123 last year. Though the rate published by the school district showed a 6 percent decrease and the village showed a 2 percent increase, those are offset by average value of homes increasing by more than 5 percent this year, to $289,000.
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UW students help install irrigation system for garden EMILIE HEIDEMANN Unified Newspaper Group
A group of University of Wisconsin-Madison engineering students, as part of their freshman Introduction to Engineering 170 class, met at Oregon Middle School Nov. 16 to lay out components of an irrigation system for the OMS hoop house to make plant maintenance easier. A hoop house, a type of greenhouse, is a tunnel typically made from steel and covered in polyethylene. It’s usually semi-circular in shape and uses radiation from the sun to warm plants and soil during
colder months. The goal, said Brian Wiedenfeld, one of the six engineering students, is to irrigate the gardens by collecting excess rainwater off of the roof of the hoop house, which is then filtered and stored. After going into the tank, the water gets pumped into the drip lines that run along the soil beds, which then seeps down into them. “When the water is collected in the water pump, it will disperse through the tubing and provide a nicely soaked surface for the plants to grow,” he said. Wiedenfeld said the visit was to establish the base structure of the irrigation system, which included rain gutters and drip lines. The group then came back on Dec. 7, to connect the gutters to a filtration system and
550-gallon storage tank. “The hard part (was) setting up the water pump that runs off solar power,” Wiedenfeld wrote in an email to the Observer. Nate Mahr, eighth grade science teacher, said the project is a part of a larger “sustainable” initiative at Oregon Middle School to incorporate gardening and healthy eating habits into class curriculum. “The thing is, we have a lot of challenges moving forward for getting our students the best education,” he said. “We need to have clean water, air and land and we need to grow food for an increasing population.” Darren Hartberg, the OMS health
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Overall increase about half of last year’s amount