MILWAUKEE, Wis. - This city has plenty to brag about when it comes to redeveloping polluted industrial wastelands and creating new jobs for city residents.

Over the past 15 years, Milwaukee has turned the Menomonee Valley, where tanneries and meatpacking plants once fouled the air and water, into a gleaming 21st-century zone for work and play with 39 businesses that employ 5,200 workers.

The valley also boasts Miller Park Stadium, home of the Brewers; the new Harley Davidson Museum; the Potawatomi Hotel & Casino; seven miles of recreational trails; and scores of acres of green infrastructure designed to capture storm runoff and reduce sewer overflows into Lake Michigan

A two-day visit to Milwaukee last week left a group of Cleveland civic leaders duly impressed by the valley and other projects that are reshaping the city's Lake Michigan waterfront, lining its riverfronts with thousands of new apartments and condo units, and lifting impoverished neighborhoods.

Convincing impressions

The visit also convinced them that they need to ramp up their commitment to planning for Opportunity Corridor, a 400-acre redevelopment zone on Cleveland's East Side, where the Ohio Department of Transportation is building a three-mile, $331 million boulevard that could spur a Menomonee-style rebirth.

The danger is that without planning, zoning and land assembly to control development, the road could become what skeptics and even some planners fear: a suburban commuter junk-scape lined with fast food joints, gas stations and payday lenders that extends from the stub end of I-490 at East 55th Street to employers in Cleveland's dynamic University Circle district including the Cleveland Clinic.

The nonprofit Fund For Our Economic Future co-organized the Milwaukee trip with the Gund Foundation, the Greater Cleveland Partnership and the Sisters of Charity Foundation of Cleveland to examine Milwaukee's successes and to see how they might apply to planning for Opportunity Corridor.

Some 29 Clevelanders attended, including members of the Opportunity Corridor Steering Committee, foundation officials, City Councilwomen Phyllis Cleveland and Mamie Mitchell, and directors of Cleveland community development organizations.

More than anything, the trip emphasized the central role in Milwaukee redevelopment projects played by the administration of Mayor Tom Barrett, recently elected to a fourth term.

Stand by your plan

Rocky Marcoux, Milwaukee's commissioner of development, said for example that Barrett staunchly backed his planners when they turned down proposals for the Menomonee Valley from companies that wanted to build warehouses or distribution centers that wouldn't meet a minimum threshold of creating 22 jobs per acre.

"At some point, the leader of the city has to say no," Marcoux said during a panel discussion with the Cleveland visitors in a renovated 19th-century coal gasification plant that now hosts the offices of Zimmerman Architectural Studios Inc.

"The first time you get a 'yes' [to something] that doesn't fit, everything goes like dominoes," Marcoux said. "You better have folks willing to stand by the plan."

Marcoux's description provided a sharp contrast to Cleveland, where Mayor Frank Jackson has refused for months to engage in planning for Opportunity Corridor.

He's holding back while he negotiates with ODOT and Jobs Ohio, the state's nonprofit economic development agency, over issues including the installation of utilities along the boulevard, hiring commitments for city residents and companies in construction of the roadway, and money to clean brownfields.

Holding out for jobs, utilities, money

He hasn't allowed staff to attend meetings of the Opportunity Corridor Steering Committee, the goal of which is to help the city leverage the road project to recruit new industries and produce jobs.

And he didn't send staff members to Milwaukee, even though the trip's organizers invited the city to participate.

On Friday, after the Clevelanders had returned from Milwaukee, Jackson said in an impromptu interview at City Hall that he feels he's making progress in negotiations with ODOT and Jobs Ohio.

But he also said that spending hundreds of millions of dollars on Opportunity Corridor would not have been first his choice about how to use such a sum.

And he said he's not participating in any future planning for the area until his conditions are met.

"I refuse to have a $300 million job go through impoverished neighborhoods without direct benefits," he said.

For their part, ODOT officials say they are meeting if not exceeding hiring goals for participation by city residents and local firms.

And they say they've found $3.1 million in a discretionary fund to complete utility construction on the boulevard without the city matching funds.

ODOT's vow

"This road's going to get built, we're going to meet our commitments, and I feel our relationship with the city is a good one," Myron Pakush, ODOT's District 12 deputy director, who attended the Milwaukee trip, said in a recent interview.

Jobs Ohio did not respond to a request for comment on the negotiation over the $10 million the city wants for brownfield soil cleanup.

In Milwaukee, descriptions of the Barrett administration's active role in the local development projects underscored the absence of members of the Jackson administration in the Cleveland delegation.

"The city [of Milwaukee] and its partners here were intentional about what they wanted to happen," Chris Alvarado, executive director of the Slavic Village Development Corp. in Cleveland, said in a debriefing session at the end of the Milwaukee trip. "That's something we need to do better in Opportunity Corridor."

The issue raised by Jackson's stance on Opportunity Corridor is whether bargaining for scores or hundreds of short-term construction jobs could jeopardize the chance to create thousands of long-term permanent jobs in the future.

Ready or not, here it comes

Because the project is nearly fully funded by Ohio through bonds backed by turnpike tolls, with strong support from Ohio Gov. John Kasich, the Opportunity Corridor boulevard will be finished by 2020, whether the city is prepared or not.

The question is whether the city's current refusal to lead the planning energetically risks causing an outcome that would make Opportunity Corridor's name a joke.

Planning consultant Paul Brophy of Columbia, Maryland, who helped lead the Milwaukee trip for the Clevelanders, concluded the event with advice and admonitions after lunch and a debriefing session at the Miller Inn, part of the historic Miller Brewing complex in the city's rejuvenating 30th Street Industrial Corridor.

"You've got something really hot," he said, referring to Opportunity Corridor. "Frankly, guys, don't blow this."