Fellow Rotarians, I am excited to announce a new addition to our weekly newsletter from your Club  Enviornmental Team. Each week, out team will include a though-provoking fact or detail relating to our environment. We hope these will inspire you to act locally to improve globally.

Aluminum can be recycled continuously, as in forever. Recycling 1 aluminum can save enough energy to run our TVs for at least 3 hours. 80 trillion aluminum cans are used by humans every year.

Brian Kendzor

Jeff Rumage, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

After years of planning, the "gateway promenade" designed to welcome visitors to the Mequon-Thiensville Town Center District is expected to begin construction May 4.

Mequon and Thiensville officials have been talking about a gateway structure since 2002, when the two communities began planning a joint downtown area called the Mequon-Thiensville Town Center District. The district includes the Mequon Town Center, Spur 16, Foxtown and downtown Thiensville.

The gateway structure at the northeast corner of Cedarburg and Mequon roads is meant to serve as an entrance point to the Town Center District. Construction is expected to be completed by October.

The semicircular gateway structure, measuring 17 feet tall at its highest point, would feature wooden slats around the perimeter, as well as logos for Mequon and Thiensville.

Inside the semicircular structure will be a concrete path, along with concrete seating areas where visitors can look out onto the Milwaukee River. A crushed granite path will lead visitors from the gateway feature to the Rotary Riverwalk.

Revised designs

The gateway feature has been scaled down since it was initially presented to Mequon and Thiensville officials in 2018. The original design featured a full circular boardwalk extending closer to the river. It also featured a stairway to a second-story observation deck.

The lowest construction bid for the original design came in at about $865,000 in January 2019. Three months later, Mequon city officials rebid the project without the second-story observation deck. The design revision did not change the construction costs, however, so the common council rejected the second batch of bids.