Hypothetically Speaking: The Voice of Janesville and Rock County — Unbiased and Unbridled

Subscribe here for more A SERIES ON GM/JATCO REFERENDUM —WHY IT WON’T DECIDE THE SITE’S FUTURE The Voice of Janesville and Rock County PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY • CIVIC LITERACY • COMMON-

Vol 2. No 42 — September 25, 2026 – 1,884 Words – a seven-minute read.

A SERIES ON GM/JATCO REFERENDUM — WHAT BEGAN AS A TWO-PART REVIEW HAS NOW EXPANDED INTO A FIVE-PART SERIES

Most of the coverage between now and November will ask one question: yes or no on the referendum. That’s a fair question. It’s also not the only one, and it may not even be the most important one.Starting this week, Hypothetically Speaking will publish a multi-part series on the underlying issues at the GM/JATCO site. These are issues Janesville will still face on November 4, regardless of the vote’s outcome from the day before. The initial five issue papers will speak to supporting a “yes” vote; others will support a “no.” These issue papers raise structural questions that transcend the referendum and will need answers either way.

The first in the series is entitled “The Real Hurdle at GM/JATCO Isn’t the Ballot Box — It’s the Balance Sheet.” It makes the case that the site’s economics, not the referendum, have already been doing the real filtering work. The economics of the site as packaged is a deciding point regarding which developers can even consider this property. Whatever happens in November, the city still needs objective, pre-written development standards, because the thirty-million-dollar cleanup bill isn’t going anywhere either way.

The second, appearing October 2, is entitled “A Tale of Two Parcels: Should Janesville Split the GM/JATCO Site?,” takes that same logic and applies it to a specific structural question: whether the site’s own contamination map detailing a more polluted north half, a cleaner south half, argues for treating this as two decisions instead of one. It looks at how Milwaukee and Chicago managed similar splits, for better and for worse, and lands on an open question the city hasn’t formally answered yet.What ties them together is simple. Both pieces argue that the referendum, whichever way it goes, resolves a political question without resolving the underlying one: what can this land actually support, at what cost, under what rules? Rules before deals has been this newsletter’s standard all year. GM/JATCO is just the largest test of it yet.Future installments in this series will take on the site’s infrastructure and utility demands, the fiscal and tax-based tradeoffs of the leading redevelopment scenarios, and what a fair, evidence-based public process looks like between now and whatever the city decides — vote or no vote.As always, here’s our claim, here’s our evidence, and here’s what would change our mind. Read both pieces, and judge for yourself whether the ballot question is really the biggest decision Janesville is facing this fall — or just the loudest one.— RH Gruber, Publisher/Editor

(Part One) THE REAL HURDLE AT GM/JATCO ISN’T THE BALLOT BOX — IT’S THE BALANCE SHEET

(Janesville, WI) — Ask most people what stands between the old GM/JATCO site and its next chapter, and you’ll get the same answer: the November referendum. Vote yes, the thinking goes, and the project stalls. Vote no, and the bulldozers show up.That framing is comfortable. It’s also incomplete.The referendum matters. But a much bigger constraint has been set on that 250-acre property the entire time. Irrespective of how anyone votes in November: the site needs a minimum of thirty million dollars in DNR-mandated remediation before it can support new development at all. That number was true last year. It will be true the day after the election, no matter which way it goes. And it may end up mattering more to what actually gets built there than the referendum question does.If Janesville wants to get this right, the conversation needs to be widened. Not just “yes or no on the referendum.” But “what kind of project can this site’s economics actually support, and has the city written rules sophisticated enough to manage whichever project shows up?”THE NUMBER NOBODY’S PRICING INThirty million dollars sounds like a headline figure. Whether it’s a dealbreaker or a rounding error depends entirely on what gets built on top of it.For a hyperscale data center campus, the kind of multi-billion-dollar project Viridian Partners had proposed, thirty million in cleanup costs is close to invisible. On an eight-billion-dollar build, that’s less than half a percent of total capital outlay. A developer writing checks at that scale absorbs environmental remediation the way a homeowner absorbs a closing cost: unwelcome, but never the reason a deal falls apart.For everyone else, it’s a different story. This site has already evaluated that theory in the real world: more than two hundred industrial firms reviewed the property in the past and walked away, and the up-front cleanup cost was a central reason. That’s not a hypothetical risk. That’s a documented track record. Even a single parcel at 250 acres, as the city insists, can’t ignore the economics of cleanup.

REALITY CHECK:
The referendum sets a political threshold. The cleanup cost sets an economic one. And the economy has already been filtering out potential buyers for years — quietly, with no ballot required.

WHO CAN ACTUALLY AFFORD THIS SITEStrip away politics and look at what this property physically offers: heavy electrical capacity, direct rail access, large contiguous acreage, and industrial-grade water and sewer infrastructure. Those aren’t generic selling points. They point toward two specific kinds of buyers.Hyperscale AI data centers are the clearest fit. They need exactly what this site has — grid capacity and cooling water — and they operate at a capital scale where a thirty-million-dollar cleanup is a footnote, not a barrier. It’s not a coincidence that the one serious proposal to date, Viridian’s, came from exactly this category of developer.Advanced heavy manufacturing such as EV battery production, integrated logistics hubs is the other realistic candidate. These projects run two to five billion dollars, still large enough to absorb remediation costs without much strain, and they specifically need the rail and utility infrastructure already sitting on the property. The fit is genuine, even if it’s a notch less certain than the data-center case.What doesn’t fit, based on the site’s own history, is the mid-sized developer. This is the kind of project that might otherwise be a perfectly reasonable use of 250 acres but can’t make thirty million dollars in upfront cleanup pencil out against a smaller return. That’s the market segment the site has already lost, repeatedly, long before anyone drafted a referendum question.

THE REFERENDUM AND THE BALANCE SHEET ARE SOLVING DIFFERENT PROBLEMSHere’s where the two hurdles actually interact, and where it gets interesting.The proposed referendum sets its trigger at four hundred fifty million dollars. Any project above that threshold needs majority voter approval. For a data center campus in the billions, that threshold is beside the point. A project that size was always going to attract public attention and political scrutiny regardless of a formal vote. For a phased development or a project structured to stay under that number, the referendum simply doesn’t apply.Which means the referendum, as written, mostly touches the exact category of project — mega-scale data centers and heavy industrial campuses — that can already absorb the cleanup cost without blinking. It has little to say about anything smaller, because anything smaller was already being screened out by the thirty-million-dollar economics before it ever got near a ballot.That’s not an argument for or against the referendum itself. It’s a reason not to treat it as the whole story. Whether November’s vote passes or fails, the site’s economics will keep doing the real filtering work in the background.

WHAT WISCONSIN’S OWN TRACK RECORD SHOWSJanesville isn’t the first Wisconsin community to wrestle with this. Port Washington voters passed a referendum requiring approval before the city can award tax incentives above ten million dollars for mega-developments. Wrightstown put a similar question to voters over a proposed data center, paired with a year-long zoning moratorium — and rejected a project outright.The pattern in both cases is the same: referendum requirements don’t stop development so much as they add uncertainty to it, and uncertainty is exactly what capital-intensive, timeline-sensitive developers try hardest to avoid.Some communities view that outcome as accountability working as intended. Others view it as leverage that cost them a deal. Both can be true at once, depending on what a given community actually wants from its land.Janesville’s referendum question will land somewhere on that same spectrum. But note what it won’t do: it won’t answer the underlying question of what standards govern the kind of massive, resource-intensive project this site is actually suited for.

WHY THE CITY NEEDS TO WRITE THE RULES NOW — REGARDLESS OF THE VOTEThis is the part that shouldn’t wait for November.Wisconsin’s Act 67 already tells municipalities how to manage this well: define objective, measurable standards in advance, and a compliant project is entitled to approval — no discretionary board vote, no relitigating the deal project by project. Communities that take this seriously are increasingly moving away from case-by-case conditional-use review and toward direct zoning standards or form-based codes that specify, in advance, exactly what a qualifying project must provide: infrastructure contributions, environmental thresholds, water and power commitments, buffer and design requirements.

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That approach cuts both ways, which is precisely why it works. Developers get predictability. A compliant project can move through approval in weeks instead of months because the standards are already written rather than argued about in real time. Residents get real protection because the standards get set before anyone’s staring down a specific eight-billion-dollar proposal and the political pressure that comes with it.Right now, Janesville has neither. It has a referendum threshold, which addresses only the largest projects and only the question of voter approval. It doesn’t yet have the underlying code language that would tell any developer — data center, battery plant, or otherwise — exactly what performance standards, infrastructure commitments, and environmental obligations apply before they submit a proposal.

That’s a gap worth closing immediately, independent of what happens at the ballot box. If the referendum passes, the city will still need clear standards to evaluate whatever project eventually clears that four-hundred-fifty-million-dollar bar and comes to voters. If the referendum fails, the city will need those same standards even more urgently, because staff-level approval processes will carry the full weight of protecting community interests without a voter check behind them.Either way, the thirty-million-dollar cleanup plus whatever infrastructure the next project demands will still be sitting on that property. The city that has already written its rules for managing that reality will be in a far stronger position than the city still arguing about them after a developer’s already at the table.

THE BOTTOM LINEThe referendum will settle a political question. It will not settle an economic one.
As long as it is offered as a single 250-acre parcel, the GM/JATCO site is always going to attract a narrow band of buyers — the kind who can treat a thirty-million-dollar cleanup as a rounding error — and that was true before anyone drafted a ballot question and will remain true after November’s results are certified.Janesville’s real opportunity is not choosing sides in the referendum but ensuring that any developer able to clear the site’s steep economic bar encounters clear, objective standards already written into the development code—not a negotiation that begins from nothing. Rules before deals is more than sound process. Without these guardrails, the referendum may be the only regulatory mechanism in place. For a site this costly to prepare, it may be the only workable strategy. The real question is whether we are ready for the major decision that eventually must be made.

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Community Spotlight: Havana Coffee

If you are looking for a place to reflect on your civic journey—or just fuel up before a council meeting—stop by Havana Coffee at 1250 Milton Avenue. It is a true Janesville gem, where espresso meets engagement.With hearty food, warm service, and a strong commitment to local journalism, Havana Coffee proudly supports the Rock County Civics Academy and all who believe in informed participation.We are grateful to Daniela and her team for creating a space where ideas percolate and conversations matter.Nowlan Law Firm and Attorney Tim LindauWe also extend our thanks to Attorney Tim Lindau and the Nowlan Law Firm for their support of civic education and democratic renewal. We value Tim’s encouragement—and his belief in the power of our mission.

We extend special thanks to the John and Lynn Westphal family and the Mark and Lori Warren family. Along with John and Lynn, Mark and Lori are deeply committed to this community and its future. Their support for the Rock County Civics Academy and our programs strengthens the outlook for a better Rock County community.

Together, with partners like Havana, Nowlan Law, the John and Lynn Westphal family, and the Mark and Lori Warren family, we are building a culture of engagement that honors both tradition and transformation.

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