By Neil Johnson - Febuary 19th 2024

 

JANESVILLE

Kwik Trip has launched plans to build another new gas station convenience store in Janesville — this one on the city’s main south-side retail corridor.

City of Janesville planner Brian Schweigl says Kwik Trip plans a 9,200-square-foot store at 1900 Center Ave. That parcel now houses the former Rock County Job Center, but Kwik Trip plans to demolish and remove the 60,000-square-foot building.

Schweigl says Kwik Trip seeks a conditional use to build a new store with a detached car wash on the large parking lot east of the former Job Center.

Plans by Kwik Trip would put the new store closer to Center Avenue than most retail development on that block.

Schweigl says Kwik Trip plans to restore the former Job Center area to green space with options to develop it later.

Neighboring properties include a bowling alley and a multi-store strip mall, all buildings that are set back on the west side of the lot, in line with where the former Job Center now stands.

The Kwik Trip project was announced last year as Rock County was discussing sale of the property.

Rock County had owned the former Job Center in 2014, and had renovated public parts of the employment office in recent years. But the county moved its offices out of 1900 Center Ave., and put the building on the market after it built out a new, multi-million dollar human services center in a former Pick n Save store building just north along Center Avenue.

Some city economic development officials and city council members have bemoaned that Janesville’s south side is considered a “food desert” — an area without immediate access to full-service, fresh groceries — since Pick n Save abruptly closed its Center Avenue store in 2017.

The former Job Center site at 1900 Center Ave. had been eyed by at least one grocery store operator as a potential location for a small-scale fresh food market following the closure in 2017. A small-market, independent grocery store operated at Center Avenue just south of the former Job Center for a matter of months in 2022 before relocating to Beloit.

Schweigl says Kwik Trip intends to build its new, Center Avenue store under the company’s “generation-3” concept — a larger store footprint that would add some fresh grocery options to the city’s south side, alongside vehicle fuel and a car wash, according to plans.

It’d be the fourth new Kwik Trip store to be built in Janesville in the last three years.

On Monday, a Kwik Trip spokesman said Kwik Trip’s looking to build about 50 new locations this year, but the spokesman had no immediate comment on the development on Janesville’s Center Avenue.

Janesville’s plan commission would host a public hearing on a conditional-use permit request for the new Kwik Trip later this month.

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