New Rock County Veterans Services Office Rent Expected to be at least $50K per year

Sutherland told The Gazette last week that he is still in negotiations with Mustafa after having the county’s General Services Committee approve a letter of intent to take back to Mustafa. Sutherland anticipates negotiations to wrap up soon and to go back to the committee for approval in August or September. Per county board policy, it only needs committee approval because it is an expenditure under $100,000.

The building the county is hoping to move into will be a multi-unit space in front of the Daniel Hale building. One unit will be a sandwich shop. Another unit, still open for a tenant to claim, is a space the county is bidding on and has been strategically chosen. Crawford chose it because of its proximity to the resource center and the ability to connect to services there via a short distance, like the job center, or the Aging and Disability Resource Center. There is also a nearby bus stop.

There are no open spaces in the Daniel Hale building. Sutherland said a standalone building would have had too high of a cost and he did not want to rule out a space opening in the Daniel Hale building in the future because “human services options change so often.” He told The Gazette he did not want to see the building be built and then have other services change and there be empty space.

“We could still meet at the library ain Beloit if need be,” Crawford said.

“It’s nothing about keeping a presence in Beloit. It was about doing the best service for every veteran in Rock County,” Crawford added.

Sutherland said there would be about 2,800 square feet in the proposed building a little less than the Eclipse Center suite that has 2,857. But the proposed building will have bathrooms inside the suite and a meeting room, which the Eclipse Center does not have.

If the new space is not ready or if the county is unable to come to an agreement with Mustafa, Veterans Services will likely be temporarily consolidated in the courthouse, Sutherland said.

Both the courthouse and the Eclipse Center have privacy concerns, Crawford said, and the new office should help with that.

“It’s just better. It’s two offices with four employees. It’s hard to keep them both open with vacations, conferences, and sick time,” Crawford said.

The Health Department cited lack of staff and lack of traffic in the Beloit office for moving out of the Eclipse Center but cited data only back to 2020. Crawford said “from 2020 to the present, 72% of the workload has been in Janesville.”

Crawford said the Veterans Services department has been staffed at four people for 20 years. He could not give details on the workload between Janesville and Beloit prior to 2020.

The Veterans Services Office is following the decision by the Health Department by moving operations to Janesville after its current lease. The Health Department also has a secondary lease in the Eclipse Center.

The county’s Human Services Department still has an office at the Eclipse Center. Rock County Executive Josh Smith told The Gazette in an email in June that the county’s Human Services Department’s Eclipse Center office will remain in Beloit for the foreseeable future.

That office, however, did lose a behavioral health clinic in recent years. The county worked with Community Health Systems and Beloit Area Community Health to transition the county’s behaviorial health clients to those systems, Smith wrote.

“This reduced redundancy and increased redundancy and increased revenue for BACH because as a federally qualified health center they get a higher reimbursement rate under the Medicaid program. So, that was a win for everyone,” Smith wrote.

Beloit also had a second courthouse at 250 Garden Lane from 1963 to 1999 when the county moved all of its judicial operations to Janesville.

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