JANESVILLE— The city of Janesville and private boosters may need to seek out other state funding sources for the Woodman’s Sports & Convention Center after the legislature’s Joint Finance Committee on Thursday cut $15 million earmarked for the project out of the proposed state biennial budget.
During an executive session Thursday evening, weeks earlier than some Janesville officials had expected, Republican lawmakers on the Joint Finance Committee voted to not fund many of the dozens of public-private and private projects Gov. Tony Evers’ had included in his capital budget and state biennial budget plan.
The cuts included a proposed $15 million in state building funds that Janesville city officials and private boosters had hoped could cover about 30% of the proposed Woodman’s Center’s price tag, most recently estimated at $50.3 million total.
Earlier this year, the state’s Building Committee rejected Evers’s building funding proposals, including the Woodman’s Center funding.
The Joint Finance Committee turned its focus Thursday to mainly preserving funding for state building projects, although Democrats on the legislative budget-writing committee voted along party lines in favor of keeping Evers’ other earmarked building funds, including for the Woodman’s Center.
The Friends of the Woodman’s Center, a private local fundraising group, has now raised just over $8 million of the $9 million in private pledges the group had set out to raise to help bankroll the project, the group’s coordinators said in an announcement Friday. Added to that would be $17.3 million the city of Janesville is poised to borrow to build the Woodman’s Center.
But both pots of money combined, along with a federal grant the project has been awarded, would still come up at least $15 million short of the likely full price tag.
Janesville city leaders on Friday said they were eyeing alternate funding options to bridge the likely funding gap for the sports and civic center that backers hope if built could generate millions in annual local tourism revenue.
City Manager Kevin Lahner said the city is “confident” it could still find a path to alternative state funding to cover the lost $15 million.
The city had not expected to hear until later this summer whether the Woodman’s Center funding would make it into the final draft of the state biennial budget. The Janesville City Council had, in fact, OK’d pushing back a final vote on whether to build the project in order to dovetail with finalization of the state budget.
Normally, the Joint Finance Committee holds off on budget decisions like the vote Thursday until later in the process—sometimes as late as late July.
Lahner said Friday there’s plenty of time for more change to the state budget.
“We’re still exploring what the options are, but we’re still confident we are going to get the funding (needed),” Lahner said. “I’ve watched the state budget get put together multiple years, and there are a lot of things that change before they get to the final product.”
Before legislative budget talks kicked off, Evers in late February visited Janesville to tout his plan to draw from a budget surplus to push forward more than $3 billion in statewide capital projects—including $15 million in state building funds for the proposed 130,000-square-foot Woodman’s Center.
The city has done some preliminary design for the Woodman’s Center, and would own the new facility, a two-sheet ice arena with flexible sports space and a convention center, all being planned at the Uptown Janesville mall on the footprint of a former Sears department store.
The ice arena portion would be the new home of the Janesville Jets, an amateur developmental hockey club and local youth and school hockey teams, user groups that have been vocal supporters and have lobbied for government funding for the Woodman’s Center.
The city and private stakeholders hope to launch Jets ice hockey and other events at the Woodman’s Center late in 2024, a timeline that would require the city to break ground on the project this fall, city project planners have said.
Mark Spreitzer, a Democrat state Senator from Beloit, and state Rep. Sue Conley, a Democrat from Janesville, don’t sit on the Joint Finance Committee but both said in separate interviews on Friday that they’d been following Woodman’s Center funding proposal through the state’s budget process.
Conley and Spreitzer called the Republican-led vote to cut funding for the Woodman’s Center and other projects “disappointing” and “unfortunate,” although they both agreed there could be other funding options.
Both said Friday they’d reached out to Evers’ office to ask about other possible funding sources, including leftover state COVID-19 relief funds.
Both lawmakers said it’s unlikely Evers’ initial $15 million commitment of state building funds for the Woodman’s Center could be revamped or rekindled after Thursday’s vote by Republicans.
Conley said it’s been rare in recent years for the Joint Finance Committee or Republican-controlled legislature to reverse course on specific funding cuts, even if a budget amendment has bipartisan support.
One emerging option Spreitzer called “nuanced” was the move Thursday night by Republicans in the same budget session to create a $50 million pot of money to possibly fund some projects
Spreitzer said that as proposed, the Joint Finance Committee and the state’s Building Commission would hold the purse strings on that funding, administered as grants capped at $4 million per project.
He said that would offer only a partial replacement of Evers’ earlier $15 million commitment. He said Woodman’s Center backers might have to mix and match smaller grant programs to equal that.
“That’s certainly not to say that they couldn’t get that $4 million, and that it wouldn’t be useful. But obviously, that would still leave a significant budget gap that would have to be filled some other way,” Spreitzer said.
“We want to reach out and see whether there might be any opportunity for funding via any other state program, whether that would be in addition to the (Joint Finance Committee’s) grant program that was just created, or instead of it. We’re certainly going to continue to explore every possibility.”
