It’s impossible to tell when Nina left the note, handwritten on paper and taped to the door of an apparently abandoned motel strewn with garbage. A half dozen of the neighboring guest room doors gape open, and broken glass shards litter the motel office entryway.
“Please do not touch! I’m coming for all this!” reads the undated note, now yellowed by exposure to the elements. A phone number scrawled on the note, dialed by a Gazette reporter, rings through to a voicemail recording of a woman who says: “Don’t leave a message. I don’t check them anyway.”
Whatever left-behind belongings Nina vowed she’d return for, they’re part of the lingering saga at the former Jessie Crawford Recovery Center — a halfway house that previously operated out of the former Pine Tree Inn motel at 4544 Highway 14, in the town of Harmony. It was established as a sober living facility for people recovering from drug and alcohol addiction.
The operator and manager walked away last year, leaving behind more than a dozen tenants in a former motel. The water, heat, and electricity were subsequently turned off.
The former Pine Tree now hasn’t had running water or power for months, following the town of Harmony’s decision in November 2022 to yank the center’s conditional use permit after the Rock County Health Department declared the property unfit for human habitation.
The property, as observed late last week by a Gazette reporter, is now strewn with discarded furniture, beds, books, clothing, abandoned vehicles and other belongings left behind by tenants who’ve apparently made a gradual exodus.
“It’s a mess,” Harmony Town Chairman Jeff Klenz told a reporter.
Multiple motel rooms last week showed clear signs of squatting, including strewn clothing and bedding, discarded food and garbage. But it appears that most or all of the 15 or so residents who officials say initially lingered, some squatting for months, have now moved on.
A clerk at J&R Liquors, next door to the former hotel, said that until the last week or so, he’d regularly seen “two or three people” who’d continued to squat at the motel, despite months-old health department orders to vacate.
“It has now been a few days since they come in here,” the store clerk said late last week. “They were having to walk over to this store a few times every day to buy jugs of drinking water. They say they have no running water over there.”
The town of Harmony, meanwhile, continues to wrestle with what to do now about an apparently abandoned property that officials say is an eyesore riddled with public safety hazards.
Adding to the “mess” Klenz referred to would be a landlord-tenant relationship at the former Pine Tree hotel that apparently deteriorated last year to the point that the Jessie Crawford Recovery Center’s owner-operator, James Crawford, walked away from the former motel and its tenants, officials said.
Town officials told The Gazette that the former hotel was subsequently managed for months by a former Jessie Crawford Center client who shifted it away from a sober living model and began housing a growing number of paroled sex offenders relocated there by Wisconsin’s state prison system.
As late as June 2022, records show that the state Department of Corrections was still paying to relocate released sex offenders to the former Janesville motel — even as tenants and an on-site property manager had begun complaining about major plumbing backups and other maintenance problems.
From renters to squatters
Harmony Town Clerk Tim Tollefson said the town has since learned that utility operators at some point last year cut electricity and gas to the former motel because its tenant and its owner, Chicago-area resident Bobby Patel, had let thousands of dollars in utility charges go unpaid
That apparently left tenants with no running well water and no heat, including during a frigid span of weeks late last year and early this year.
Officials said local police, the county and the town received repeated reports late last year that the former tenant-turned property manager had begun using gas-powered generators to run space heaters and portable cooking stoves at the motel.
The town of Harmony last month sought a circuit court order that would bar anyone from living at the former Pine Tree pending cleanup and property fixes. Tollefson called the situation “sad,” saying that when the Jessie Crawford Center launched, its operators sunk time and effort cleaning up the aging motel and sprucing up its rooms.
Later this summer, Tollefson and town attorney Mike Davis said, the town hopes to craft a nuisance property ordinance — the first of its kind for the town since it was established in 1848.
Envisioned is an ordinance that would give the town authority to fine or take other action against owners who leave properties abandoned or in a state of disarray.
“This is really the first time we’ve had something come up where it’s been like this, so we’re trying to be not too harsh on how to write some new rules. It’s not about long grass. And if a resident has a pile of junk their yard, we call them, and things usually get cleaned out,” Tollefson said. “But when you have a completely uncooperative landlord who isn’t willing to do what they need to do, then you have to write an ordinance to give you an ability to fine somebody.”
The Rock County Sheriff’s Office has received to a handful of calls to the motel in the last few months — mainly for civil disputes over personal belongings. Neither the county nor the town have filed any action that would require the sheriff’s office’s assistance.
The nearest residential neighbors are in subdivisions off Highway 14, at least 1,000 feet away, but about 10,000 people a day drive past the property, according to state traffic counts.
A neighbor who spoke to a Gazette reporter last week said the piles of discarded mattresses, shattered big-screen TVs, and even an old RV, haven’t moved in months.
Tollefson said town officials who watched the center’s operations and the former Pine Tree property seem to fall apart in tandem are likely to be leery of ever allowing another sober living group home.
Kate Luster, the director of Rock County’s Human Services Division, said county human services and public health officials gave a handful of tenants information on rehousing resources, but no direct aid, after the health department in February declared hotel as uninhabitable.
Luster and Katrina Harwood, director of Rock County’s public health department, indicated that they believe none of the people who’d been squatting at the Pine Tree this past winter and spring months were enrolled in any county-run social service programs.
They both said the county doesn’t have regulatory oversight to track clients who live at private sober living residences on a voluntary basis.
Luster said by the time the health department interceded, the county no longer was referring any clients to the Jessie Crawford Center. She said that’s because the facility at some past point ceased running as a sober-living facility.
As early as 2019, the Jessie Crawford Center had begun to fill as many as half its rooms with convicted sex offenders placed by the Wisconsin Department of Corrections. Those residents, officials said, were made to wear electronic ankle monitors and follow strict parole provisions.
The county is focusing now on channeling opioid settlement funds from a class action of counties against drug companies, and recovery housing continues to be a top priority, Luster said.
Luster said the loss of a sober living house, regardless of the reasons, is a setback as Rock County continues to face an unmet need for drug and alcohol addiction recovery services.
“I don’t want to convey that we have enough of this (drug rehabilitation) resource here, because we don’t. It’s a gap,” Luster said. “Conceptually, sober living resources are a huge need in our community. It’s a priority area that we don’t have enough resources to meet.”
The Jessie Crawford Recovery Center, run as a voluntary center, continues to operate 40 sober-living units at a half dozen Madison-area locations. There’s also an existing recovery center in Sun Prairie that Crawford plans to take over and operate, according to a recent story in the Sun Prairie Star newspaper.
James Crawford said in a phone interview with a reporter last week that he’d worked with Rock County and local health care network Mercyhealth to house sober living tenants at the Janesville site.
He said those clients lived alongside people referred by other area drug rehab centers, as well as some convicted sex offenders placed at the center. But he said the Crawford Center severed its lease with the former Pine Tree’s owner in spring of 2022.
Crawford said he sank tens of thousands of dollars into fixes at the motel to re-launch it as a sober living center. He said the motel’s owner later neglected maintenance and upkeep, failing to follow suit with ongoing fixes after the rehab operation had given the property a facelift.
State court records indicate Crawford over the past five years had faced legal action for failing to pay property taxes.
He acknowledged he handed off a Baraboo sober living center he was running to two women around the same time he decided to sever ties at the Pine Tree in Janesville.
Crawford said had trouble during the COVID-19 pandemic and during the months just prior finding enough staff to run his Baraboo center.
A person Crawford identified as James Dean, a former tenant at the Jessie Crawford Center, had taken over as manager at the motel — but under a different tenant agreement with Patel, and under a model that departed from sober living, Crawford said.
Klenz and Tollefson said that change required the town to sever the building’s conditional use permit that had allowed for the operation of a sober living house.
It’s not clear where Dean is now. Late last week, the motel property seemed vacant of people, although a motorcycle was parked in front of the main office and a large panel van airbrushed with a Roman gladiator battle scene sat parked next to a storage building. The storage building was strewn inside and out with garbage and mounds of abandoned belongings.
James Crawford said although it may not have been his responsibility, he returned to the Janesville motel last summer, months after he’d severed ties there.
He said town officials in mid-2022 told him the sober living facility was drawing complaints of a backed up septic systems and a lack of hot running water.
Crawford said he went to the site and verified those problems, but also at the time told the county he no longer had any ties to the property nor responsibility for its tenants.
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