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Those troubles may end next month when the Winona City Council decides whether to renew the Wilkie’s lease, amid criticism of the building’s leadership, acknowledgement that repairs will cost more than $400,000 and the city’s decision in June to shut down the building because of structural damage.
Twenty-five years after the Winona community rallied to build the Wilkie, it is sharply divided over the future of the steamboat replica.
Most focus blame on Paul Sweazey, the board chairman of the Wilkie Steamboat Center. Attendees at a public forum last month asked Sweazey and the board to resign. But those who have been involved over the years say the problems are more complex and systemic, superceding Sweazey and the current board and reaching back to the building’s first days.
Building, funding and fixing the boat
Julius C. Wilkie was the name given in 1959 to a retired wood-hulled tow boat that was purchased by the Winona County Historical Society, placed in Levee Park and converted into a museum.
Months after a March 12, 1981, fire destroyed the boat, the community began figuring out how to replace it.
Leighton Wilkie, one of three sons of the former Winona businessman whose family funded the first museum, offered a $200,000 matching grant to help build a replica.
The Wilkie Steamboat Center was incorporated as a nonprofit organization soon after, hired an architect to draw up plans and sought construction bids. The lowest came in around $578,000, much more than the center had hoped, but it was from a local company and hundreds of thousands of dollars cheaper than other bids. Though the center hadn’t matched the grant, it still received the $200,000 and began construction in late 1981.
The plans, designed by the Illinois architect Robert Coffin, remain private. Winona’s Building Official Steve Carson declined to release them recently but talked about the construction, detailing several deviations.
The wooden support posts were supposed to be pressure-treated and aluminized. The pine siding was supposed to be cedar. There were supposed to be several architectural details, such as ornamented columns and railings.
And there was supposed to be an elevator.
“From what I understand, the project was so tight on money that they cut a lot of corners,” Carson said.
When it opened in 1983, the top deck was off-limits until an elevator was installed. The city gave the building a temporary certificate of occupancy that was somehow never revoked, though it was occasionally violated, including one instance in the 1980s when several hundred Winona residents posed for a group photo on the building, more than a hundred standing on the top deck.
As early as 1988, board members worried publicly about leaking roofs, rotting wood and peeling paint.
Several small repairs were made over the years, but the building was never substantially renovated. The two additional construction phases planned in 1981 — which included building the elevator and were estimated to cost about $432,000 — were scrapped because of cost.
In June, the city shut down the Wilkie because of severe structural damage. It remains closed today.
A preliminary architectural assessment completed earlier this month estimated repairs at about $400,000.
Carson said the city likely won’t agree to reopen the Wilkie until several of the repairs are made, including installing an elevator, bringing the bathrooms and kitchen up to code, re-installing stairways that had been roofed over and servicing the sprinkler, electrical and heating systems.
The money
According to past financial statements and Winona Daily News stories, the Wilkie lost more than $5,000 in 1983, its first year of operation. It lost $5,000 more in 1985. (Figures were not available for 1984.) In 1986, the loss ballooned to nearly $19,000, although a fundraiser that year brought in nearly $100,000 in cash and another $40,000 in in-kind donations. In 1987, it lost $12,500.
The trend continued, and in 1988, it was discovered that the business was $113,000 in debt.
The center received $40,000 from the city and Winona County, with each agreeing to cover half of the loan, to help the board retire long-term debt.
In 1991, the center asked the city for an additional $64,000. The city acquiesced, deciding to use a portion of the money it collects from hotel taxes to create a loan for the Wilkie. It apparently sold the Wilkie building and all its contents to the center to meet state requirements for that agreement.
In 1995, Paul Sweazey was quoted as saying the Wilkie was turning a profit, though it continued to be plagued by long-term debt. In 2002, he again said the boat was making money.
Sweazey produced financial statements that show the Wilkie had an average revenue of about $12,700 over the past two years, but after utilities and other expenses — including $3,000 a year in repairs — it had only cleared $968.
Former board members attribute the financial struggles to the fact that the board never had an endowment to draw on. Many nonprofits count on interest from endowments to provide a steady revenue stream. The Wilkie received money from several fundraisers and gifts over the years, totaling in the hundreds of thousands of dollars but never had a consistent source of funding.
The management
The board struggled to find cohesive management the day it opened, and some say it’s still looking.
The Winona Area Chamber of Commerce was originally contracted to run the building, but the chamber backed away six months later. The center eventually signed Riverboats America of La Crosse, Wis., to a three-year contract. That company backed out after two years.
In 1986, the board hired a pair of local women, Carole Nelson and Marlene Kohner, who brought modest success to the Wilkie by leading several fundraisers and dinners. They stepped down in 1988 to pursue other interests, hoping they had restored the board’s finances.
The board then hired William Thompson, only to see him leave after eight months, citing “poor business” as his reason for stepping down. Carole Nelson returned briefly until the board eventually agreed to assume management duties.
The board
When the Winona Steamboat Center was incorporated, its bylaws called for a nine-member board: two each from the Winona County Historical Society, Winona City Council, Winona Area Chamber of Commerce and Winona Area Jaycees; and a representative selected by the Wilkie family.
In 1984, the board rewrote its bylaws, allowing current board members to elect the majority of new members — not an uncommon practice among nonprofit organizations — and through a series of revisions removed representatives from the Winona Convention and Visitors’ Bureau and other organizations.
And the board — once a transparent entity that included former Historical Society President Lewis Younger, current Hiawatha Broadband Communications President and CEO Gary Evans and others — began to close itself off.
That distancing, former board members say, accelerated when Paul Sweazey joined the board in the early 1990s. The owner of Winona-based Valley Security became chairman around 1995.
Arlene Prosen joined the board in the early 1990s and stayed about four years.
“People were talking about it, and it sounded like they needed help, and I could do that,” she said. “Just like other people who have been on the board and then left.”
She said she cleaned out rotted food from the refrigerator and dead mice from the sink. She helped plan fundraisers and other ways to get the Wilkie on a more solid financial track. But she resigned around 1994 when she said Sweazey tried to start a restaurant in the building without getting board approval first.
Don Stone didn’t last nearly that long.
He joined the board in the summer of 2005 but resigned after a month, frustrated with the leadership.
“I went to the first board meeting, and there were only three of us there,” he said. “And then I wanted to get a copy of the articles and corporate papers, and it took Sweazey a bit of time to get all that put together for me. I finally just said ‘no’ and left.”
The center’s meetings have been closed for years, and Sweazey has refused to announce meeting times or release copies of agendas and minutes.
Board members paint Sweazey as a man who loves the Wilkie and believes he’s doing the right thing for it, but has a tendency to be aggressive and promote his own agenda.
Autumn Herber, who served on the board from 1999 to 2004, stands by Sweazey, though she acknowledges he sometimes struggled to cooperate with other board members.
“I always got along very well with Paul,” she said. “He tried really hard. He’s very passionate about the Wilkie, but he can’t do it all himself.”
Only one of the five current board members Sweazey identified at a recent forum — himself, Ev Holz, Bud Robinson, Pam Stoneberg and Sue Sasser — returned repeated phone calls for this story. Stoneberg declined to comment.
Other former board members also did not return phone calls and e-mails asking for interviews.
The end of the Wilkie?
The Wilkie has been declared unsafe and closed by the city. The board, saddled with annual profits well under $1,000 and a repair bill estimated at $400,000, will face skeptical council members Sept. 4 when the Winona City Council considers a future lease.
Community members have expressed interest in fundraising and volunteering, but many have said they won’t step forward unless Sweazey and the board resign.
Sweazey has said he and the board are not resigning.
If the lease isn’t renewed, the board has 90 days to either tear down the boat or move it. It could also leave the structure intact and dissolve the nonprofit; in such a scenario, the city would then own the building and be forced to grapple with whether to demolish or restore it.
Former board members are almost unilateral in their support for the dilapidated building.
“The Wilkie is a wonderful landmark for Winona, and it would be a crying shame for anything to happen to it,” Autumn Herber said. “I strongly feel that way. Granted, it needs a lot of work and an organization to really stand behind it, but more than that, it needs some time. It has potential.”
But the community is generally more divided, and some have suggested the river real estate, long identified as one of the city’s most valuable holdings, would be better served with a Mississippi River interpretive center or other attraction.
City Manager Eric Sorensen suggested during a recent city council meeting that if the lease isn’t renewed and the center leaves the building behind, the city may give people time to come forward with donations. The city, hoping to fund transportation projects with a proposed half-cent sales tax and already nearly finished with next year’s budget, would be hard-pressed to devote the money needed to repair the building.
“Once we can determine the cost, which we never seem to be able to, then there’s the big question mark,” Sorensen said in a recent interview. “Who’s going to invest in it?”
If someone steps forward and completely renovates the building, it isn’t clear whether a brand-new replica with the same business model that has left the center consistently in debt for 23 years would do any better.
A wilkie timeline: 1956 — 2006
1956: Winona County Historical Society buys the retired 64-year-old James P. Pearson for $2,500; boat towed to Winona and placed on the levee.
1957 — 1959: Wilkie family contributes about $23,000 to restore the boat and add a second-story museum. Pearson is renamed Julius C. Wilkie in honor of their late father, a former Winona businessman.
March 12, 1981: Fire destroys the Wilkie. Engine and paddlewheel salvaged, but historical papers, plans and drawings by steamboat inventor Robert Fulton are lost.
November 1981: Leighton Wilkie gives $200,000 challenge grant toward building a Wilkie replica.
December 1981: Work begins on building after board accepts a $578,000 construction bid.
1982: Winona Steamboat Center Inc. formed as a nonprofit to manage the building. Bylaws call for 10 board members, two each appointed from the historical society, Winona City Council, Winona Area Chamber of Commerce and Winona Area Jaycees.
April 1983: Wilkie opens with Chamber of Commerce in charge and loses more than $5,000 by year’s end. Without an elevator, it doesn’t meet fire code, and the third deck remains off-limits.
1984: Wilkie board amends bylaws to allow current members to appoint new members.
1986: Wilkie Steamboat Association signs 20-year lease with city.
May 1988: Leighton Wilkie declines to continue financially supporting the building.
August 1988: Wilkie manager William Thompson leaves after six months, the fourth manager to leave during the building’s five years of existence. The Wilkie is $113,000 in debt.
1991: Wilkie closed for the majority of season because board can’t afford necessary repairs.
October 1991: City agrees to use $64,000 loan to bail Wilkie out of financial troubles.
July 1994: Center board member Paul Sweazey proposes restaurant run by Hillside Fish House owner, but plans fall through.
1994: City questions whether Wilkie board and its ownership of the building are legal; city attorney decides they are.
1996: Center finishes paying off city loan.
June 2002: Center board chairman Sweazey says the building has turned a profit for five years running.
2005: City requests two years of financial statements from Sweazey. Talks about the building’s future break down.
June 14, 2006: City closes Wilkie because of structural problems and threatens to withdraw certificate of occupancy.
July 27, 2006 : Sweazey shows up at public forum on Wilkie, talks guardedly about his closed board and the boat’s future, and turns over financial statements. He says the board spends about $2,000 a year in repairs.
Aug. 7, 2006: Wilkie repairs estimated at $400,000.
Sept. 1, 2006: Wilkie’s lease expires
Sept. 4, 2006: City council to debate whether to renew the lease
Sources: Winona County Historical Records, Winona Daily News archives, assorted Wilkie-related documents.
Reporter Brian Voerding can be reached at (507) 453-3514 or at brian.voerding@winonadailynews.com.
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