In January 2019, Preston Cole left his post as Commissioner of the Milwaukee Dept. of Neighborhood Services and became Secretary of Wisconsin’s Dept. of Natural Resources. It was a step up for the 25-year veteran of public service—a forester by profession—who as the city’s top building official had reformed DNS by fostering a developer-friendly environment.
For the building team seeking his required signature on a variance for an unprecedented 284-ft-tall mass-timber and concrete high-rise, Cole’s departure from DNS was both untimely and unsettling. “We had a scare when Commissioner Cole got a new job,” says Jason Korb, principal architect for the local firm Korb + Associates Architects, which is designing the 25-story code outlier, named Ascent.