JANESVILLE — Acting Janesville City Manager David Moore joked Thursday during his State of the City address that he hopes he’ll never again have to deliver the annual message.
The longtime police chief only agreed to temporarily take the top post at City Hall until a new city manager is hired. If the city meets its own deadline, that could happen by April.
Moore’s jest came during the city’s ninth annual “State of the City,” a tradition launched by former City Manager Mark Freitag, who left in October for a job in Colorado.
The address comes just a week before the city is expected to name the finalists in a national search for the next city manager. In a 41-minute talk Thursday, Moore laid out the opportunities, plans and challenges the city’s next manager will have in the coming year.
Moore said the next city manager won’t have to dig back very long into local news stories to catch up on what he sees as city’s only major public controversy: whether or not Janesville residents want the city to build a new $50 million ice arena and convention center at the Uptown Janesville mall on Milton Avenue.
Moore acknowledged that while its boosters say the massive public- private project will move the community and its economy forward, some city residents worry that forward motion could mean runaway costs. But Moore cast that conflict as healthy — even positive.
“Both of those (viewpoints) are great things for our community,” Moore said. “They’re different belief systems, but everybody wants what is good for our community. That’s the level of our controversy.”
“If I’m looking to come here and that’s all I have to work through, that’s doable.”
Moore touched Thursday night on the city’s distinctly different neighborhoods, and hit on some signs of economic growth that have the statewide development sector eyeing Janesville as a growing hub for industry.
Pointing out the completion this past year — long in coming — of the mega-expansion of Interstate 90/39, Moore called Janesville a city on the move in 2022. That happened, he said, despite a midyear economic lull and continued turnover in leadership and staff that’s drawn the city down to about 75 fewer workers than a year ago.
City departments that deal with planning and economic development last year saw though 4,800 commercial work permits, 483 plan reviews, 117 housing starts, and 76 new apartments, Moore noted.
Alongside that, Moore pointed out, Janesville will bring in a new city manager at a time when there are many more potential commercial developments in the pipeline than just an ice arena on the city’s north end.
Janesville last year inked about 15 new tax-increment financing deals, tax incentive packages that helped spur new commercial development deals worth $231 million.
And, Moore added, on the table right now are a massive 1.5 million-square-foot hydroponic greenhouse on the city’s south end, along with 129 acres of newly-bought city land aimed at luring massive commercial developments, with new industrial properties in the ballpark of “1 (million) to 2 million square feet.”
A new city manager will also inherit ongoing economic development talks with Commercial Development Company, the St. Louis firm that continues to own the mostly idled—yet fully cleared—250-acre former Janesville General Motors Assembly plant property on the south side.
Commercial Development has been mostly quiet since an initial announcement midyear in 2022, but the firm has said it’s seeking to turn part of the former GM site into an intermodal rail-to-truck transfer station to bolster shipping logistics between Chicago and the upper Midwest.
Moore called all of 2022’s local growth and the future prospects “progress” for a city he said now has “more jobs than there are people, and more people than we have homes for.” That’s something he called a “good problem set.”
