Ideas For Janesville's Future

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How Things Got This Way

JG Editorial Excerpt:
City Manager Steve Sheiffer say’s the city’s vision is to make the Dawson/Jackson Street area a major park.

Just what Janesville needs - another greenbelt park.

What Janesville does need is thee park. You know what I mean, a large park built from big dreams with big money and all the civic attractions and markers expressing what Janesville is all about.

We have the location in Riverside for this but unfortunately, they have splintered the activities over the years, and administration elites drove much of the funding into Palmer. It’s too bad because City Planners now have two parks dividing the city and now want to segregate it further by creating another medium scale park in what could arguably be the city’s most prime real estate for economic development.

But what I find just as troubling if not an obstruction to progress is the city’s rigidity on an ancient and unfunded vision the City Manager has referred to as the Riverfront Plan.

Janesville Neighborhood Shut Out Of Progress:
After almost 90 years, Janesville finally is starting to look the way John Nolen envisioned it could. The famed landscape architect, who was integral in planning a state park system for Wisconsin, was called in to take a look at Janesville's first city plans and had an idea.
"This was back around 1920," said Brad Cantrell, the city's planning director. "He recommended the city turn the area along the Rock River into parks and open space. He saw it as a major asset to business, and up to that point, it had kind of been an industrial corridor. A lot of businesses here had turned their backs on the Rock River."

And do you know what? The Delavan/Jackson Street area in Janesville has been frozen in time ever since. Who wants to invest in a business or buy property in an area when the city wants to turn it into a park from plans drawn up nearly 90 years ago?

At the last council meeting the City Manager made another interesting comment. He said when the city council approves a development or commits to a resolution, the action is void if no funding is earmarked by the time the council’s term expires. Yet the city planners continue to rehash Nolen’s plan not from 20 years or even 40 years ago, but from 90 years ago! Those supporting this old idea today are said to be visionaries. Nolen was the visionary, and after almost a century of unfunded mandates, I’d say his term has expired.

The Jackson/Delavan Street Area

This is MY idea for the Jackson/Delavan St. area.

Turn it into a mixture of privately developed mid-rise condo’s and small stores with large sweeping terraces to the river. The properties would be oriented with their facade, balconies, decorative features and large windows facing the river. The views would be spectacular relative to what Janesville has to offer. Sure, the street side faces GM, but there are architectural and landscaping tricks that could be employed to diminish this adverse view. And who knows how long those smokestacks and industrial tanks will remain in play anyhow, with the expected closing of the plant. It would give Janesville a taste of what they’ve seen in other towns and would offer a fine example encouraging other property owners along the downtown river corridor to join the club - without forcing them.

This would be a high-end development with the river as the main attraction, not some earthen berm meant to block the view of a Big Box store. This would serve as Janesville’s experimental concept and entrance into 21th century living, eventually melding the nearby and affordable single-family residences from the Fourth Ward into a well balanced and self-sustaining community. Micro CSA’s could fill in any remaining vacant parcels.

Turning this area into another green-belt park would be a crime whose time has past. It would return zero tax dollars and would continue to push economic development away from the city’s core to the outer edges in the form of sprawl. It’s time to get past the 1920’s. If anything, the cost of energy demands it.

The GM Plant

Of course, I hope Janesville does not lose the GM factory, but if we do, I’ve mentioned another one of MY ideas in a comment to an earlier posting from June 28th.

It involves turning the 200+ acre facility grounds into a wind and solar power generating facility - NOT a factory as recently explained by another creative individual in the Janesville Gazette. Don't take that comment as a attack against the factory idea, I mentioned it merely to show the fundamental difference between our ideas.

The other key element to MY idea is to sell the electricity produced back to Alliant in the form of credits on residential OR business electricity bills. The facility would be owned and operated by the taxpaying residents of Janesville, the "Janesville Perpetual Energy Company" if I may - not a private entity.

I believe this development would be an irresistible incentive to attract businesses, entrepreneurs and others into Janesville. The window to acquire multi-million dollar Federal grants for such a green-powered facility is just around the corner - the possibilities are endless. General Motors may also be willing to ante up millions to extricate itself from environmental liabilities expected to be uncovered at the property.

Another idea of MINE is to turn the GM location into a giant state-of-the-art Expo Center complete with county fair grounds, outdoor band shell AND a duo-purpose ballpark for the Snappers and Gladiators. The location is ideal for volume traffic as the surrounding streets have already been modified to handle the additional loads. When one considers that the cramped confines of Wrigley Field in Chicago has only an eight acre footprint, it is easy to put into perspective the size of the GM plant. Janesville's Rotary gardens is about 15 acres. The Reuther Way access road running into the heart of this location help make this idea for multiple recreational facilities even more appealing. This would be more than just a Rock County facility, it could be South-Central Wisconsin's Regional Recreational and Expo Park.

Even though I’ve posted these ideas on the Internet and invite people to consider them, I’ve highlighted these ideas as mine simply because they are. This Web-presentation is time and date-stamped, and I welcome others to convince the city to change course on the Riverfront Plan before it's too late. In addition, I also realize this proposal might sound presumptuous and beyond the bounds of an ordinary citizen. But we all search for reasons why things shouldn't be.

If key elements of this prospectus are implemented, I would expect credit to be given where credit is due.

At the same time, I don't pretend that this is the economic rapture Janesville has been waiting for, or think any of it can or will happen anytime soon without funding. Nolen’s concept has been on the books without funding and without completion for over 90 years, they are no longer visionary. Lesson learned.

The only other suggestion I can make is directed toward individuals who feel as strongly about their ideas as I do. Before you pass them out casually during conversations or to individuals and organizations requesting you send the ideas to them, have your idea documented, notarized or digitally date-stamped at the minimum. I don't mean to sound preachy on this, but much of the world's wealth is built either on somebody else's labor, other people's money or stolen ideas.