| By Neil Johnson, reporter/anchor, Big Radio |
Bids for construction of the planned Woodman’s Sports and Convention Center are in, and Janesville city officials say the results are good news. It puts the 130,000-square-foot ice arena and metro center project on the cusp of being a full go.
The city of Janesville announced Tuesday that Janesville builder JP Cullen has entered the low bid for the project — submitting a base bid that’s just over $38 million.
City manager Kevin Lahner says that’s well below the city’s proposed $50-million cap for the project, which has been in planning and cost-cutting modes for more than a year. JP Cullen’s bids include alternate construction materials, but they don’t include so-called “soft costs” for furniture and other items related to finishing the project.
The city says it must crosscheck all the bid documents for accuracy and completeness. But barring any significant issues, Lahner says city staff will forward the bids to the Janesville City Council with a recommendation for approval Jan. 22.
Lahner says a detailed and thorough crosscheck is vital because multiple contractors had bid to build the Woodman’s Center, and he says all of them gave cost estimates “within two percent of each other.”
If the council awards bids in January, it would green-light the project, vaulting it into construction after a few years of twists and turns in financing and project planning — including a $15-million gap in state funding vital for the project that Gov. Tony Evers plugged this fall with COVID-19 recovery funds.
In all, the city is poised to funnel $17 million to build the Woodman’s Center, alongside about $9 million in funding the private-side Friends of the Woodman’s Center says it’s raised.
A $38.1 million bid would be well below the city’s cap on the project. After calculating in soft costs for the project along with margin of error, which builders call “contingency costs,” and an extra $1 million in unanticipated, anonymous private funding added to private stakeholders’ capital stack this summer, the project could be between $1.5 million and $3 million under a previously set budget and spending cap.
That’s assuming soft costs such as furniture and equipment don’t surpass parts of the construction budget that’d be bid out at some point in 2024.
It provides leeway the city didn’t assume it’d have in what’s being regarded as the biggest-ticket city project in Janesville’s history.
In 2022, early designs for the project showed construction costs mushrooming well beyond initial, $40-million estimates. Some of the early estimates shocked even the staunchest backers of the project, because the numbers crunched at that time showed construction material inflation could have driven the Woodman’s Center’s construction price tag well above $50 million.
It took project consultants, the city’s ad hoc design committee for the Woodman’s Center, and the city’s engineering office months of back-and-forth to pare back project costs while maintaining original conceptual plans for a two-sheet ice arena alongside flex sports space and convention hall space.
The facility would replace the city’s existing, aging ice arena on east side, and it would have room for multi-sports use alongside 20,000 square feet of convention hall space, according to plans.
The main user would be the Janesville Jets, an amateur developmental hockey club that hosts high school-age players who are college and professional hockey prospects. The Woodman’s Center would also host multiple youth and high school hockey programs on a second sheet of ice.
The project is viewed as potentially transformative for the Uptown Janesville mall, where it’s planned to be built on the site of the defunct former Sears building, which has been empty years. The mall faces large-scale vacancies, and its owner, private equity fund RockStep Capital, seeks to find new ways to use spaces.
RockStep officials and local Uptown Janesville management have said the project would give the mall a new lease on life, and could even spur new construction of nearby apartments and hotels, sparking a transformation of the city’s main shopping mall into a city center relying on sports and convention foot traffic.
Right now, the mall has a commercial vacancy rate of more than 50 percent.
City officials have said the project would be a boon for the city’s Milton Avenue and Humes Road retail corridor, and local stakeholders like Woodman’s Market have infused millions in funding to push the public-private project into reality.
Meanwhile, private stakeholders have say they’ve continued fundraising for the project.
Some opponents of the Woodman’s Center have said they don’t like that the city has yet to go public with what it could cost taxpayers annually to operate a city-owned metro center with multiple sports and event uses.
Under an agreement, the land where the former Sears now stands would be given to the city, and the city would own the Woodman’s Center. Tentatively, it would be operated under a third party manager, at a cost to the city that’s not yet been made clear.
City officials say if the project gets the go-ahead, demolition could start in February at the former Sears. The Woodman’s Center could be up and running by late summer 2025.
Check back at Big Radio, WCLO Radio, and WCLO.com, your local voice in news, for more coverage on the Woodman’s Center.
