Business View Magazine | September 2020

304 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 2020 quality employer, and put Janesville on the map with site selectors who realized the city had a speed-to-market collaborative approach to working with developers and helping them stay on their timeline. Price admits, “It didn’t hurt that we have a good, strong, smart workforce here. For example, in late 2015, we entered into an agreement with Castle Metals to consolidate and locate in Janesville. They had facilities in Chicago and Minneapolis and decided that Janesville was the perfect spot to distribute to both locations. They worked with a local developer to construct a 208,000-sq.-ft. building that opened in 2016. All their prospective employees have to take a skills test. The pass rate in the Chicago Metro area was 15 percent. In Janesville it was over 70 percent. It speaks well to our good education system and smart workforce. We may have lost a major employer, but we’ve maintained high quality living. The population base is steady at 63,500, and it’s just a great news story.” idea was to collaborate on a plan for moving forward to help the area recover from that period, focused on marketing existing assets and strengths, with the goal to backfill vacant spaces and restart the growth of the community from both the manufacturing/business side and the residential side. It took some time to take root but in 2013, the city started seeing the fruits of those labors. The local plastics manufacturer built a new plant and then, since 2015, things have taken off. Janesville acts as its own industrial developer; it buys land and prepares it for industrial use with water, sewer, all utilities, streets, and then it markets that land through Rock 5.0 and the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation. The largest success to date was in 2015, when an agreement was negotiated with Dollar General to build its 13th distribution facility in Janesville. That one million- sq.-ft. facility on 124 acres guaranteed 550 jobs for the community. It opened in early 2017 and has been a very successful company, a