Open letter to W Solar

We here in Wausau are eager to learn where your company will build a manufacturing plant that will employ as many as 600 people making your high-tech solar panels. We were ecstatic to learn back in January that Wausau was one of the few Wisconsin cities along with Eau Claire and perhaps others that have shown interest since then being considered for the facility.

We won't disparage Eau Claire or any other city in this great state. We don't have to. We think what we have to offer in Wausau speaks for itself.

You already know some of our key assets. Your company spokesman, Evan Zeppos, was on target when he said this about Wausau in January: "It's a very good spot as it relates to a supply chain, geography, transportation. It has a well-known reputation for having a good workforce, and it's certainly very high on the quality-of-life scale."

We couldn't have said it better ourselves. But here are some things you might not know about us.

For more than 160 years, Wausau has reinvented itself again and again. We were born in the mid-1800s when settlers began clearing the Northwoods and turning it into lumber for a growing nation. In the early 1900s, our economy began a transition when Employers Mutual Insurance of Wausau later the Wausau Insurance Cos. was founded.

We continued to rely upon the timber industry, but rather than make lumber for other regions of the country, we started value-added companies of our own, making doors, windows and paper. The good workforce that Mr. Zeppos referenced proved itself able and capable of making most anything. Ask the folks at Greenheck Fan Corp. in Schofield, which makes air-moving equipment that is used all over the world. While you're at it, ask the folks at Greenheck about the origins of that company two brothers working in a garage indicative of our community's entrepreneurial spirit.

Nowadays, we still make windows and doors and paper fully one-third of our workforce still manufactures something or another for a living. We also still dabble in insurance. And we have transitioned again, into the regional health care and shopping hub for the northern half of Wisconsin