Crawford County's Veterans Memorial has moved from its spot on the southwest corner of the county's property in Prairie du Chien. Thankfully, people don't need to look too far to find out where it went.
According to Supervisors Gary Koch and Brad Steiner, the memorial moved to the southeast corner of the property (corner of Wacouta Avenue and Haydn Street), and Kraemer Brothers, the general contractor for the county jail project, relocated it for free. Benches will be placed at the memorial's new site.
"They do this quite a bit because the original Kraemer Brothers were World War 2 veterans," said Koch, "so when something like this comes along with these types of facilities, they donate that."
Koch said the word was "quite a nice donation" with an estimated value of somewhere between $35,000 and $40,000—that's one percent of the total cost of the county's $35 million jail project.
"Everybody was shocked because we were all expecting it to cost a tidy sum, and Kraemer Brothers came and said we'd like to donate that," he said.
According to Koch, the memorial had to move from its previous spot because of the new jail facility, which runs close to the southwest corner of the property.
Finishing up
According to Nate Bremmer, a member of the county's jail transition team, the entire jail project is nearing completion. A final report from Kraemer Brothers is expected to be submitted to the Board of Supervisors in October. "We're looking at substantial completion in mid-September. It was supposed to be sometime this month, but then there were issues that arose that took precedent."
Koch said the project has been slightly delayed with HVAC cooling system balancing. "We got to have [contractors] come in and certify the heating and ventilating."
At the Supervisors' Aug. 18 meeting, Koch said the jail project is projected to be approximately $250,000 under budget. He later said much of that came from better-than-expected interest rates accrued on the money borrowed to pay for the project. "It was interest that we earned at the bank. It's kind of hard to project that sometimes. We had favorable results because, maybe, the money didn't come out as fast as we initially thought it would."
The additional money has allowed the County to do some work on the 1867 portion of the county building, such as re-tuckpointing and lighting replacements.
"We're doing a large replacement of lighting in the courthouse with LEDs. We'll get some rebates, and with less energy used, hopefully it will help our budget out," said Koch. "If we didn't have interest on that borrowed money, we couldn't do some of this."
Koch said he wants to use some of that excess money to reduce next year's debt levy to help out county taxpayers. "We're probably going to throw the remainder of that money at the debt levy in 2027."
