Year of New: Woodman's Center, Major Traffic Upgrades, Recast Leadership Among Top Janesville Stories of 2022

Major roadwork wrapped up on the northeast side and a safety review began of East Memorial Drive, where a 9-year-old boy was killed by a motorist in September. Local and midterm elections brought new and returning faces to office. And Rock County began construction on a nearly $100 million jail expansion project.

Additionally, later this week, Gazette reporters Neil Johnson, Ryan Spoehr and Kylie Balk-Yaatenen will share their most memorable moments doing their jobs in 2022; photographer Anthony Wahl will share his favorite photos of the year; our sports staff will run down the top local sports stories and photos of 2022; and Karyn Saemann, hired as managing editor in May, will reflect on her first months in Janesville.

To start us off, here are some of the top Janesville news stories of 2022:

Woodman’s Sports and Convention Center

2023 may turn out to be the year of the Woodman’s Center.

The planned ice arena and multisport and convention center in its current incarnation—a $50.3-million, 130,000-square-foot two-sheet ice arena with 20 square feet of convention space—would be the biggest public-private project in Janesville’s history.

It’s also become one of the most hotly contested projects to come out of Janesville City Hall in years.

In early December, supporters and opponents of the proposed new home of the Janesville Jets packed the council chamber and for more than two hours debated the merits of a project the city of Janesville could contribute at least $17.3 million to construct—plus an annual operating subsidy if the facility runs in the financial red its first years.

The current city council has committed to borrowing millions needed to build the project, and private entities have already committed up $5.6 million for the project.

Time will tell, though, if the Woodman’s Center can clear its biggest hurdles. To go forward, officials say it likely would require securing all of the $24 million in grants the city is now seeking, mostly in state and federal COVID rescue funding.

If any of those grant requests falls through—or if final design or construction bids come back in the spring higher than the current $50 million estimated price tag—that could leave the Woodman’s Center vision at a crossroads.

Supporters say the arena and convention space could transform the city’s northside retail sector and put Janesville on the map as a destination for large weekend trade shows and youth sports tournaments in which families come to play but also to shop, eat and stay in hotels.

Councilman Douglas Marklein gave a pragmatic reality check at a recent city council meeting. He said that if the Woodman’s Center secures too little funding or proves too costly to build, “it could go ‘Pffffft’!”

City and school district leadership changes

After almost four decades of working in public education, and five years as superintendent of the Janesville School District, Steve Pophal retired June 30.

Mark Holzman took over as superintendent July 1 after seven years in the same position in the Manitowoc School District. He’d also held administrative roles throughout eastern Wisconsin, including in Fond du Lac and Howards Grove.

Meanwhile, at Janesville City Hall, Mark Freitag left his post as city manager in October after nine years. Freitag took over as the city manager of the Denver, Colorado suburb of Westminster, on Oct. 24. Freitag became a top candidate for the job because of his tenure as the Janesville city manager, but also because of experience and accomplishments as a combat veteran and military base commander for the U.S. Army. The new position had a base pay of $265,000, a large pay increase over his salary as of 2020, which was $172,000, according to city records.

Janesville Police Chief David Moore was appointed as the interim city manager after Freitag’s departure. Moore has been the police chief for 13 years. Under the law, Moore can fill in for six months before the city must hire a permanent replacement or appoint another one on an interim basis.

Traffic improvements and safety

It has taken since 2015, but we’ve reached the end of long-running road tear-ups on Janesville’s north end linked to the more than $1-billion Interstate 90/39 expansion between Beloit and Madison.

For much of 2022, local shoppers and travelers continued to have to circumnavigate the closure of a busy stretch of Humes Road between the Highway 14 and Highway 26 interchanges at I-90/39. The work, which wrapped up in late fall and reconfigured lanes and turn lanes on the retail-heavy spur, was the official capstone on the I-90/39 lane expansion project. That project had for the better part of a decade has left parts of the city’s traffic-heavy north end hard to get around with closures, detours and temporary zig-zagged lane detours.

The result is a new funnel for local and traveler traffic that the DOT considers an improvement for vehicle flow.

In the city’s center, meanwhile, a safety review is planned for East Memorial Drive that could bring upgrades to intersections, including those with crosswalks or signaled intersections. Spurring the study are a mounting number of crashes between the Memorial bridge and Milton Avenue.

The Gazette reported neighborhood concerns over traffic safety along East Memorial Drive after authorities say an SUV driven by a woman without a valid license struck and killed a 9-year-old Janesville boy at a cross street in September. The cross street had no marked pedestrian crosswalks.

The boy was walking home from school. At the intersection where he was killed, state traffic counts show between 10,000 and 20,000 cars go past on East Memorial Drive each day.

Housing

Housing, especially access to safe and affordable housing by those of low income, continued to be an important and evolving story in Janesville in 2022.

A local nonprofit social service group said late in the year that a rent cliff could be looming for thousands of local apartment tenants who will be running out of federal COVID-19 rent assistance in the coming months.

A homeless shelter operator said she hopes to see landlords come to the table for talks a public-private homelessness task force hosts several times a year.

In the Fourth Ward, where aging rental houses abound, someone tattooed the outside of an apartment with a huge, spray-painted message that accused an elderly woman by name of failing to pay thousands of dollars in rent. A Gazette news report of the spray-painting, reprinted in newspapers nationwide, highlighted the growing crisis that exists in big segments of the housing market across the U.S.

Data reported by The Gazette, meanwhile, showed that both local rents and the cost of local homes for sale are marching up significantly as lending interest rates climb.

Officials here ranging from government housing authorities, nonprofit coordinators to social workers lament that there aren’t enough living spaces that the lowest-paid residents—a growing number of residents here overall—can afford.

That prompted one local activist group, the Rock County Democratic Socialists of America, to announce in December it was trying to organize an autonomous tenants union. The proposed Rock County group that would help renters who face troubles with landlords iron things out before the local court sees yet more eviction filings.

In November, a Rock County court commissioner expressed astonishment during a Zoom hearing of dozens of eviction proceedings, when a woman pleaded against her eviction over the phone while at the same time pumping gas into her car on the way to work.

“This is just my life,” the court commissioner said.

Industry

It’s hard to gauge much from quiet, private economic development discussions that roll out between local property owners and large developers and the city of Janesville.

But the main sales pitch many of those entities are making is that the city’s industrial south side is high on the list right now of developer interest.

Much is in flux, but Janesville city officials are hashing out multiple land and development deals.

The city’s economic development office this fall has rolled out new options to purchase hundreds of acres of farmland south of Highway 11, near the massive Dollar General distribution Center that officials say is tied to developer interest.

This comes as Milwaukee Developer Zilber Property Group has invested millions of dollars into developing hundreds of thousands of square feet of new, light industrial buildings on the south side.

A major tax-increment financing deal, potentially the largest in the city’s history, could bring a massive, 1.5 million-square-foot hydroponic greenhouse operation, and other light industry to a couple of hundred acres that for years has housed a local pheasant farm.

And the owner of the 250-acre former General Motors site, a cleared brownfield that’s sat idle since 2020, announced in fall of 2022 a vague but ambitious plan to kickstart redevelopment along railroad spurs that run through property. The tentative plan, owner Commercial Development said, is not for manufacturing, but rather transferring shipping crates from rail to over-the-road trucks, a business operation known as intermodal shipping.

And one long-time local company said its final good-bye in 2022.

Work ground to a halt in the spring at the Hufcor plant on Kennedy Road after owner, Los Angeles private equity firm OpenGate Capital, outsourced operations to Mexico.

That left about 25 remaining local union plant employees with a promise of extended health insurance coverage as part of a severance. But OpenGate’s planned outsourcing of the construction of its hmovable wall partitions to a Mexico facility failed. By June, Hufcor’s owners had put the 100 year-old Janesville company in bankruptcy receivership. The move abruptly left the few dozen remaining union workers with no health insurance coverage. At least one unemployed former employee was left holding the bag on thousands of dollars in medical bills.

Retail

Janesville’s northside retail sector is in transition, whether you’re talking about dining, shopping or startup boutiques.

Coming out of the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the city of Janesville in 2022 saw a return to in-person shopping and dine-in crowds. But the shift to remote spending that came fully of age during the pandemic has left an indelible footprint.

That’s not stopped some new brick and mortar prospects, especially on Janesville’s north side. Blain’s Farm & Fleet and Target both saw major store upgrades in 2022, and a multimillion-dollar new Hy-Vee grocery store with a full-service burger restaurant, pharmacy and online order pickup depot is slated to open in 2023 off Humes Road across from Woodman’s.

Janesville’s main shopping mall, Uptown Janesville, rung in 2022 with a court decision that allowed the ownership to shed about half the property’s tax assessment. The logic: the mall is now 60% empty following a series of small retail closures in the concourse spurred by the COVID-19 lockdown that shut the mall down to in-person shopping for a stretch of 2020.

Following close on the heels of the court decision was month-long closure of Kohl’s in the spring —one of just two retail anchors remaining at the mall. A suspected arson in the big-box retailer’s bedding department set off the store’s sprinklers and left millions of dollars in inventory with smoke and water damage.

The mall could win big—and city officials say it would boost its value greatly—if the city moves forward with the planned Woodman’s Center. It could bring an infusion of millions of dollars of new development, and likely, more foot-traffic to the north-side retail corridor.

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