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Business owners along Winona Avenue are excited about the road’s potential future, but they also want the thoroughfare to be properly maintained while the possibilities are realized.
Tuesday evening for about 90 minutes, the Winona Avenue Business Association (WABA) heard from Warsaw Mayor Jeff Grose, OrthoWorx CEO Ryan Christner and Executive Director of Catalyst Corridor at Grace College Emi Kreklau on the effort and funding that is being planned for the roadway.
David Phelps, CEO of Orange Market Group and a co-founder of WABA, said he, Kosciusko Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Rob Parker and Bryce Glock, Polywood, are the three guys leading WABA from the Chamber. Phelps and Glock are on the Chamber board of directors.
“Bryce and I took on the mission of creating the Winona Avenue Business Association and trying to get some momentum and activity going to find out what is going on with the redevelopment plan for Winona Avenue,” Phelps said, noting the first meeting was about a year ago.
They’ve defined the redevelopment of Winona Avenue as the corridor from the railroad tracks to the roundabout.
“There’s other things going on in our community, there’s stuff going on all over the county, we know that. But the purpose of this group is to talk about specifically what’s happening on Winona Avenue, what can we do to help the leaders in our community deliver good solutions for us and have them tell us the things that they have in their timelines, or not in their timelines, and we can share our feedback,” Phelps said.
City Efforts
Grose said when he was probably less than three months into office as mayor about two years ago, he was briefed on the top 10 infrastructures for the city. He said he wanted Winona Avenue to be at the top of the list “and it was done that quickly.”
Unlike the private sector, the public sector moves slower. However, what happened in early 2024 was the state awarded $30 million in Orthopedic Industry Retention Initiative (OIRI) funds to the community, with OrthoWorx managing the dollars. The first draft of what the community could do with OIRI funds was created in January 2024, and that included the Winona Avenue project.
On Winona Avenue, the draft states, in part, “The redevelopment of Winona Avenue would consist of rebuilding the infrastructure to improve walkability, pedestrian safety and general aesthetics. Changes could include a road diet to two lanes, on-street parking and more green space.”
Grose said last summer the Redevelopment Commission committed to an approximate $200,000 study of Winona Avenue by American Structurepoint. The study is currently looking at the area from the roundabout to the railroad tracks, and may be completed in the spring. The study will let the city know “what does it look like, what could be done.”
Meetings with stakeholders will then be held, and decisions will have to be made, he said.
“You drive down Winona Avenue every day for 20 years. The study is going to show you it will not look the way you’re seeing it right now, and with that will be consequences. It will change everybody’s view and the realities of it. And I hope, with our help and other stakeholders, most importantly you, will be able to come up with something that will work,” Grose said.
Concepts and other ideas will be explored, and then the city is hoping from that it’ll give the city an idea of what steps to take next.
A phase of the project may be started in the spring or summer of 2028, but Grose said a lot of work will have to be done and a lot of money.
As to what the city is doing right now to maintain Winona Avenue, Grose provided a list from Public Works Director Dustin Dillon of what work was done in 2025 and what work is slated to be performed on the road in 2026.
“We’re doing the very best we can, but we have to be very careful of the amount of dollars that we’re going to put in until we get this study and we have some idea of what might be the best fit or what might work best,” Grose stated.
As a note, the Jomac buildings on Winona Avenue will be demolished this summer, he said, with $500,000 of the costs coming from a grant.
Later, Linda Divine, co-owner of Owens & Company, said it seemed to her the normal wear and tear of Winona Avenue “doesn’t really get eyes on it, at all, of late. Like in the last 10 years, if you call the street department because there’s a crater out front, they’ll come, but they won’t look for it. Even the guys say, ‘Winona is falling apart. It needs a whole redo.’ So it’s in their minds, they’re just not looking. So what’s it going to look like in nine years if this takes nine years?”
Grose said if there’s any issue or concern with maintenance day-to-day operations, she needs to call him directly. She can also call Dillon.
However, the city has 240 lane miles. Winona Avenue is a part of it and issues will be addressed, he said, “But again we do have to be very, very careful in what we do because you don’t want to throw money onto something and then within this summer, a few months, you’re told this is not what you should have done or this is what can be done.”
If they have direct questions, Grose encouraged them to get a hold of him.
OIRI Dollars
OrthoWorx has earmarked $1 million for Winona Avenue out of the OIRI dollars.
Christner said, “It’s just like a business. So if you have dollars and you’re going to invest it in your business, you want to know what the ROI (return on investment) is going to be for it, right? So, the state has the same thought of, we gave Kosciusko County, specifically OrthoWorx, $30 million, as Jeff alluded to. They haven’t told us that they want to see it turned into $300 million, but that’s our goal, to turn it into $300 million.”
OrthoWorx has invested or committed $13.4 million and Christner said they’re getting a six-times return on those commitments that they’ve made already.
“So a pretty good return so far this stage in the game,” Christner said. “One of the challenges that we face with when we’re deciding on how we spend these dollars, is if we’ve got a million dollars for Winona Avenue, do we want those dollars to be sunk into engineering costs or do we want to actually do pavement issues or things like that? So, that’s kind of the Catch-22 that we’re trying to work on. If our preference is we want to see shovels in the ground, progress being made, (that means) not necessarily paying for engineering studies and things like that.”
He said they can guarantee things are going to happen when shovels get in the ground, but can’t always guarantee they’re going to happen with engineering studies.
OrthoWorx also has a timeline to be aware of as the end of the OIRI three-year grant cycle is June 30, 2027. Christner said they don’t necessarily have to have all of the dollars spent, but they have to be committed and planned.
“I think my hope is that we can identify through these studies what’s a project that we can say, ‘That’s what we want to put these dollars toward,’” he said.
He mentioned OrthoWorx committed $50,000 of the OIRI dollars to help with the community match for the demolition of the Jomac buildings on Winona Avenue so the community didn’t have to “come to the table” for that.
Catalyst Corridor
Grace College received $27 million for Catalyst Corridor Projects through the Lilly Endowment in 2024 that includes a series of initiatives in Warsaw and Winona Lake. Of that, $1.7 million is going toward Winona Avenue.
Kreklau said, “Some similarities and certainly a lot of synergy with the OIRI initiative, but also some differences. So one thing I talked about was the $27 million that we got from Lilly is toward $100 million in kind of community and Grace partnership projects. Those are pretty much designated projects. So a lot of the ideas and kind of vision for OIRI kind of happen simultaneously as the Lilly Endowment grant initiative came out. But the Lilly Endowment really required kind of hard, defined projects. So most of our projects are defined, we’ve already started some of them.”
The Winona Avenue piece is part of the infrastructure part of the grant called the Connection Ways. Kreklau said Grace sits in Winona Lake, as opposed to Warsaw, but the Connection Ways portion of the grant “was really infrastructure connecting Warsaw, so Winona Avenue, what we’ve been talking about this evening, to Winona Lake and to Grace’s campus.”
Even though the hard scope of the Winona Avenue project kind of stops at the roundabout, she said from a Catalyst Corridor perspective, “the Catalyst Corridor continues past the roundabout, into Winona Lake, to Grace’s campus and along King’s Highway all the way out to Miller Field and out toward Pierceton.”
She said they have some other infrastructure projects that will tie into Winona Avenue.
“We want to add sidewalks along King’s Highway,” Kreklau said, to make the length from Grace’s campus to Winona Avenue walkable. “... We want to improve Winona Avenue, but the Catalyst Corridor is a little bit broader in terms of really connecting Warsaw, Winona Lake, making it walkable, bikeable. Certainly safety, lighting, all of those things, but it’s really about connecting Warsaw, connecting Winona Lake. So as we work with the city on the Winona Avenue portion, we’re also working with the town of Winona Lake so that we really enhance that entire corridor to make it much more accessible from a community perspective.”
She said they want Grace students to be able to walk or bike from campus to Winona Avenue and to the businesses along the way and to do it safely.
“So there are some other infrastructure advancements and projects that will tie into what the city is doing around Winona Avenue directly,” Kreklau stated.
Facade Program
Parker informed the WABA the Chamber has allocated a facade program for Winona Avenue.
“So if you have property and would like to improve it, we do have dollars and a grant program up to $35,000, in $10,000 increments, so if you want to beautify your building, come see me,” he said. If the facade program goes well, Parker said they could access more dollars, but they’ll start with $35,000 and see how it goes.
