Day 1: KANDU Industries Clients Welcomed at New Milton Site

Wednesday was the first day that Yoss and other KANDU clients worked at the location at 15 Plumb St., in Milton. Blackhawk Tech sold the 110,000 square-foot building on Milton’s east side, that includes classroom and production space, to KANDU Industries in May.

For now, KANDU and Blackhawk Tech are sharing the space in Milton.

KANDU has moved into about one-third of the building, encompassing three former welding rooms. Blackhawk Tech still has about 250 students on the site and will continue to lease back some classroom space from KANDU through the end of its current semester in May.

Liz Paulsen, the executive director of marketing and communications for Blackhawk Technical College, said the college will start moving out after that.

Blackhawk Tech has been at the Plumb Street facility since 2014. It once housed a manufacturing site for compressed natural gas vehicle fueling systems.

Finding their way

On Wednesday, KANDU clients followed blue arrows to several large rooms where they found their stations and got right to work.

Over the past two years, KANDU Industries has reshaped its mission and sold off some real estate, including the former Armory in downtown Janesville and the Pontiac Convention Center, where it had run its hospitality operations, including Best Events, an event catering arm.

KANDU Director of Marketing Linda Diedrich said that Wednesday was part of phase one of the move. Staff had previously moved some of their production from a Barberry Drive location in Janesville to the former Blackhawk Tech welding and mechanical rooms, but Wednesday was the first day the clients were on site.

Clients, staff and production at another KANDU location on Adel Street in Janesville won’t move until June when Blackhawk Tech’s semester is over.

Diedrich said KANDU has big plans for the new space.

Hansen said that the new facility will give the nonprofit as many as eight classrooms — more than twice the number it has now. Along with plans to grow its in-house production work “by 20%,” Hanesen said the new space in Milton will help it grow its adult day services and memory care program to eventually serve up to 80 clients.

“We’ll be able to serve a larger number of people because we can serve Jefferson County,” as well as Walworth County and Green County, she said.

She said KANDU has three buses that can bring people to the new location and it is on a Milton city bus route.

Hansen said that there are no windows in their Janesville buildings and that is hard for their clients with Alzheimer’s Disease and dementia.

“A lot of Alzheimer’s and dementia patients need to know when it’s daytime and when it’s night so those windows are so important to have, it does so much for mood,” she said. “It really does feel like this building was meant for us.”

There will also be many more rooms for programming and wider hallways for wheelchairs. “It makes such a big difference in their lives, but to them this is huge,” she said.

Hansen said clients were excited about a train outside, near where they are going to put their cafeteria, and they will have outside production areas.

She said Blackhawk Tech has been accommodating, offering its staff training on how to direct clients who get lost and how to get back to where they need to be.

“After we vacate the space, we will be down to two locations; we still have our Monroe campus,” Paulsen said. “Centralizing everything is a great asset to our students, where we have all of our services from our cafeteria, and all of our clubs and everything are at the central location. So they will have better access to those amenities as students, including our tutoring services in our library, and all of that stuff is at the central.”

She said Blackhawk Tech is also opening up a new public safety building that will have a fitness center and track in it.

Paulsen said the Milton site once had up to 400 Blackhawk Tech students.