Access, Renewal: Special Olympians, Mall, Anticipate Woodman's Center

Buchanan has long been hunting for a permanent home for her athletes, more than 100 people who represent Janesville’s local chapter of the Special Olympics. For years, Buchanan’s local Olympians have practiced and competed in elementary school gyms and city parks — wherever and whenever space is available. Or they’ve taken their competition on the road, traveling to southern Wisconsin communities that have dedicated facilities for Special Olympics.

Yet, Buchanan’s voice as one of dozens of grassroots members of the private fundraising and booster group, Friends of the Woodman’s Center, might be worth more than any amount of money. The Friends group organized as an executive unit of a dozen members to lobby for and plan privately the massive Woodman’s Center project.

The group has grown to encompass about 200 volunteers—about 50 of whom are affiliated with local nonprofits that, like Buchanan, see a brighter future with space and facilities for their events and activities.

Buchanan knows that public dialogue and sentiment about the massive public-private project — likely the biggest economic development proposal in Janesville’s 188-year history — runs from upbeat, supportive and hopeful to skeptical and immovably negative.

She also knows the Woodman’s Center, initially pitched as mainly a two-sheet ice arena has — right or wrong — been bore into the view of some local residents as mainly a place the Janesville Jets hockey team and a host of youth hockey leagues would call home.

That’s even though the city and the private Friends group have spent months touting the project as also having community meeting space, convention space and flexible multisport space for basketball, volleyball and turf sports.

Buchanan and her Janesville Area Special Olympians aren’t into hockey. For them, the prospect of the Woodman’s Center could mean they’d have a permanent brick-and-mortar location to meet, hold fundraisers, banquets, and their own athletic practice and competition space for basketball, bocce and other sports, for the first time ever.

The hope, Buchanan said, is that the Woodman’s Center would become a home for community activities—for her group and many others. She’s not sure how many in the community know that just to play basketball or bocce, her athletes must travel to other towns.

As an ambassador for the Friends of the Woodman’s Center she’s had impromptu talks with residents at coffee shops, both about her nonprofit and the opportunities her athletes could have through a pending partnership with Uptown Janesville’s management and the Woodman’s Center that also has backing by the Special Olympics of Wisconsin.

Buchanan said some of her chance coffee chats have opened eyes. She said people might look at a big sports arena in a different vein if they knew it had a trophy case dedicated to awards Janesville Area Special Olympians had earned—maybe some at tournaments the Woodman’s Center could someday host.

“We travel to other places that have what we want to have, you see these communities embracing their sports complex. On the flip side, I think we’ve struggled with getting Janesville to embrace what this could mean to our community. It’s obvious to me it’s exciting to see what could happen with this,” Buchanan said.

Nicodemas Nimmo, another member of the Friends of the Woodman’s Center, has a child with an autism spectrum diagnosis. He looks at the hopes of local Special Olympics being buoyed by the possibility of a new space as hope also for his own child.

Nimmo, a contract community photographer and Anchorage, Alaksa transplant who now lives in Milton, said the potential for the Woodman’s Center wouldn’t just be for Janesville, but for inclusion of residents in Milton and other nearby communities that don’t have bona fide venues for sports or other larger-scale events.

That’s exactly the picture for another Woodman’s Center Friend, Jim Hessenauer. Milton Hockey’s head coach is at the helm of a still-fledgling, 10-year-old high school hockey program that pulls students from both Rock and Walworth Counties.

Milton Hockey would be one of the users of ice at the Woodman’s Center, both for practices and games. Right now, the city of Janesville’s aging, one-sheet ice arena south of downtown is booked tight enough that the only available practice slots for Milton’s teams are either at nearly midnight or at 4 a.m., Hessenauer said.

Neither is an ideal practice time for high school students. For years, Milton Hockey has held the largest share of its games at the nearest open hockey arena—almost an hour away from home for some Walworth students who play for Milton’s hockey team.

The Woodman’s Center, if it comes to pass, would be a game changer (or at least a practice schedule changer), Hessenauer said.

“We’d be right there with the Janesville Bluebirds, practicing from 4 to 5:30 after school, which, you know, in high school athletics, that’s when everyone practices,” he said. “To be able to practice normally, you know, kind of put things back in the sense of a normal high school athletic program, we’re excited. I can’t wait for it to be done.”

Like the rest of the community, Hessenauer and his colleagues on the friends group await a Janesville City Council vote that has been expected in August on whether to send project designs to bid. Earlier estimates were that the city would have clarity on the more than $20 million in government funding it had sought to float the project, and the council was planning to vote on a final go-ahead to build the Woodman’s Center sometime in September.

That would put demolition of the former Sears building at Uptown Janesville—a necessity to make room for the new Woodman’s Center—as a project crews could launch in October. If the Woodman’s Center is a go, it could open sometime in late 2024, city planners have said.

Janesville city officials didn’t respond to inquiries from The Gazette last week about whether the city has any immediate prospects to fill all or some of a major gap in the project’s public funding tied to it not receiving $15 million in state budgeted funds this year. The state legislature’s Joint Finance Committee axed that funding from the budget this spring after Gov. Tony Evers had publicly earmarked it for the Woodman’s Center project.

Multiple city of Janesville officials also didn’t respond last week to questions from The Gazette over whether the timeline of the project has shifted, and what projected annual operational costs the city would undertake as operator of the facility.

Julie Cubbage, site manager at Uptown Janesville, and another member of the Friends of the Woodman’s Center, said the mall’s ownership, equity firm Rockstep Capital, is in continued negotiations on the Woodman’s Center project with the mall’s anchor stores.

She said the talks revolve around lease stipulations on parking capacity for the anchor stores during both construction and future operations of the Woodman’s Center.

Cubbage said she believes the shopping mall, which has struggled with large-scale retail vacancies, has a future that hinges largely on the prospect of the Woodman’s Center.

Rockstep’s own plans include a five-story hotel on the now defunct east side of the nearly 1 million-square-foot mall, along with a new restaurant, an open-air courtyard and companion amenities for families who’d attend conventions or sporting events at the adjoining Woodman’s Center.

Cubbage said she hears every day from customers and walkers at the mall’s concourse that the mall will reach a tipping point, one way or another, depending on the fate of the Woodman’s Center plans.

She said she hopes the scales tip toward the survival and revival of the mall.

Cubbage said the Woodman’s Center isn’t a prospect she can yet promise potential retail tenants, either independent and corporate, but she said more and more prospective tenants are becoming aware of the potential for the sports and convention center to happen.

She hopes to soon see retail begin again to flock to the mall.

“If this (Woodman’s Center) takes off, and I’m serious, my phone’s going to be ringing off the hook. I’m not going to have space,” Cubbage said. “That’s what’ll be the problem.”

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