By Neil Johnson njohnson@gazettextra.com May 3, 2022
JANESVILLE
The city of Janesville aims to create another tax-increment financing district on its east side, this time blanketing a 46-acre chunk of city property adjacent to W.W. Grainger’s massive warehouse and call center complex off Enterprise Drive.
The city hasn’t moved forward yet, but consultants the city has hired on economic development work recommend the city hold a public hearing May 16 to create TIF 39, a 70-acre swath of commercially zoned land just south of the Janesville Youth Sports Complex.
About two-thirds of the land in question is a 46-acre, city-owned parcel adjacent to the Grainger sprawling complex.
Another TIF distirct, TIF 32, is located just to the south and encompasses dozens of commercial parcels. TIF 32 extends westward from Highway 14 to near Palmer Drive on the city’s east side.
Municipalities typically use TIF districts to offer commercial or industrial developers tax incentives that can help offset the cost of development and related infrastructure improvements. Under TIF deals, municipalities are allowed to use extra tax revenue that new developments create to repay some development costs for projects that otherwise wouldn’t have happened without tax incentives.
City officials haven’t said what possible projects or economic development prospects are spurring the city to designate more land on the east side as TIF-zoned properties, but recently, the city has seen growing interest in commercial properties on the east and south sides that are within proximity to the Interstate 90/39 corridor. The new proposed TIF district is within a mile of the Interstate’s Racine Street interchange.
The city council would have to vote to approve the boundaries of the new TIF district, which plans show would run in a nearly 1-mile swath between Capital Circle and Enterprise Drive and the Youth Sports Complex.
Recently, the city of Janesville has worked to buy options on new development land south of Highway 11 near the Dollar General warehouse on Janesville’s far south end. The city also has an active request for annexation of dozens of acres of private land in the northeast corner of the intersection of highways 11 and 51 that a developer hopes to buy under a proposal to transform the land from a pheasant farm to a massive strawberry greenhouse that would cover 1.5 million square feet.
Those land moves could groom Janesville’s south and east side for new development by adding on a few hundred new acres of shovel-ready commercial land.
The moves also come as Janesville’s city-owned vacant business park parcels have begun to fill with developments, leaving the city with a dwindling inventory of publicly owned shovel-ready land over the last few years.
The city is also still waiting to learn how Commercial Development Company, the owner of the 240-acre former General Motors site, intends to address the rubble piles and environmental liabilities that remain on site.
The GM site is sizeable and is in proximity to major rail spurs, but Commercial Development tried unsuccessfully late last year to sell the entire property at auction as it awaited a decision from the state Department of Natural Resources over whether it would be required to remove concrete and other material that now serves as a cap covering environmental contamination from almost 100 years of industrial operations by GM.
Commercial Development has repeatedly been warned by the city’s building department over its failure to clean up and remove concrete foundation and rubble piles from the 115-acre parcel where the GM plant once stood.
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