By Big Radio Staff - November 12th 2024

 

JANESVILLE

The Boys & Girls Club of Janesville learns it faces nearly $1 million in extra costs to build a future youth club facility on the city’s south side.

The add on costs are for environmental cleanup of contaminated soil on the building site.

Boys & Girls Club Director Rebecca Veium confirms in an email to Big Radio that it’ll cost $800,000 to clean up known contamination of lead, benzene and petrochemicals in the ground of the half-acre site at 915 South Jackson Street.

The site is a formerly city-owned plot that the city of Janesville conveyed to the Boys & Girls Club last year. It’s where the nonprofit plans to build a $12-million youth center.

Estimates from earlier this year were that the club had raised $8 million toward the project, including various state and local grants earmarked to build the youth center at the South Jackson Street site. The nonprofit aimed to break ground in 2025.

State environmental records show the Department of Natural Resources placed an environmental closure letter on the site in 2008, when the city obtained the Jackson Street parcel.

A closure letter means that if any future development would disturb the ground or known contaminants that remain within it, it could reopen the environmental books on the property.

DNR Records say soil test borings from 2008 show multiple areas of lead and benzene soil contamination located 6 feet to 8 feet below the surface in the middle of the South Jackson Street parcel.

The DNR indicates in records that the contamination is linked to fuel tanks present during former industrial use of the site.

The city rezoned the site from industrial to commercial last year, and with the city council’s blessing conveyed the land to the Boys & Girls Club — along with a $750,000 local grant to aid the project.

It’s not clear if Boys & Girls Club officials and the nonprofit board were aware of the scope of contamination prior to taking ownership of the former city land, and doing site planning for the project.

A brownfield consultant the Boys & Girls Club hired began communicating with the DNR on the possible cleanup conditions for the land in April, according to DNR email records.

Veium says a local contractor and an environmental engineer are now working with the Boys & Girls Club on a site cleanup plan.

She says the nonprofit considers the scope of soil cleanup “unfortunate,” but that her group remains “excited” for the new youth center, which it intends to build on the South Jackson Street site once it’s cleaned up.

Veium says the Boys & Girls Club intends to use the future south-side clubhouse to serve “10,000 youths” in the coming years.

Its location on the south side was chosen because of its proximity to the bulk of the city’s the demographic need for after-school day care and other youth services.

The city of Janesville owns hundreds of parcels throughout the city.

The future Boys & Girls Club site is along the Rock River, adjacent to a segment of the Ice Age Trail, and just west of the Dawson fields softball complex.

Just north across the river, along the east end of Rockport Road, is another parcel of city land the city has spent most of the last year trying to groom for development of multi-family housing.

The city’s now seeking to buy the 250-acre former General Motors complex, which has known soil contamination that the DNR says must remain capped or it faces environmental cleanup.

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