Activists want ability to bypass elected officials and directly quash large development projects on old GM site
Business and city leaders in Janesville are warning of the long-term economic damage of citizens taking direct control over major development in the city.
What began as a backlash to a proposal for a data center on the toxic and long-ignored site of a demolished General Motors plant — a proposal now withdrawn — led to a rarely used direct legislation petition that successfully sought a much broader referendum question on the Nov. 3 ballot.
“Should approval of proposed development agreements, development projects, sales, and leases of the GM/JATCO sites for projects exceeding $450 million in project costs be decided by a majority vote of the electors?” the ballot language asks.
The question does not contain the phrase “data center” and it confines itself only to the 250-acre site on the south side of Janesville. Passage will make it all but impossible to attract a developer for the abandoned property, opponents of the referendum say.
The idle, 250-acre GM property cost taxpayers $3.5 million to buy, has been off the tax roll for nine years, and will cost at least $35 million to clean up and make saleable, according to city Finance Director Dave Godek. Development would help relieve residents throughout the city of some of their property tax burden.
A $450 million development that, for instance, produced $2.75 million a year in property taxes would result in an annual average savings of $76 a year for every homeowner in the city, Godek estimates.
Activists have made clear their hostility to data centers anywhere in the city, said George Cullen, a co-chairman of Grow Janesville Responsibly, a coalition of business and labor groups, in talking to the Badger Institute.
On Sept. 13, the City Council approved on first reading a 12-month moratorium on data centers. The council scheduled a public hearing and could approve the moratorium before the citywide direct legislation vote.
Advocates are sending a message to developers that they are willing to circumvent, by direct vote, a process that works through city staff and elected officials and that is commonplace throughout the state, Cullen said.
“No prospective developer is going to want to do business with us if they think everything they do will end up going to a direct vote,” Cullen said. “This is going to handcuff the city.”
City Manager Kevin Lahner, City Attorney Wald Klimczyk, Economic Development Director Jimsi Kuborn and City Clerk-Treasurer Lorena Stottler said as much in a memo to elected officials in January after certifying 3,927 signatures gathered by anti-data center advocates SNOW Janesville and No Janesville Data Center.
“We contend that requiring a referendum for large-scale development decisions could delay or discourage timely investment and limit the City Council’s ability to effectively manage and negotiate complex redevelopment of the GM/JATCO site,” the memo read.
Nor is just that site: Advocates for growth say that requiring a referendum for large developments could have stymied some of the city’s recent wins.
One such win was a medical isotope producer. “SHINE’s total investment to date in the Janesville community has well exceeded the $450 million threshold,” said SHINE Founder and CEO Greg Piefer in a diplomatically worded statement: “We’re proud of what we have built here and we’re just getting started.”
Piefer said that had the restriction been in place when the company was picking a home for its large-scale plant, “we would have been challenged” to pick Janesville.
The City Council approved putting the referendum on the Nov. 3 ballot by a vote of 7-0, its other option under law being to enact the proposal as an ordinance right away.
What went unexplained at the time was why the question that concerned only one property but affected any kind of development, or why was the threshold for a direct vote on a development set at $450 million, a figure petitioners developed. Also unclear: how and when, exactly, direct public involvement in any development proposal would occur. If a proposal were made in January, would a developer have to wait until a scheduled April or even November election?
City Attorney Klimczyk has not addressed those questions, at least not publicly.
The Badger Institute contacted the seven City Council members to ask about the referendum question and their understanding of how it would work. Four did not respond, including Josh Erdman, the husband of Cathy Erdman, one of the organizers of SNOW Janesville, a vocal opponent of data centers in Janesville.
Council President Larry Squire told the Badger Institute he has questions about making permanent a $450 million base to trigger a public vote.
Squire said he hasn’t made up his mind whether he supports a large-scale data center in the city and isn’t sure a referendum on all development at the GM/JATCO site is a good or a bad thing.
“However,” Squire said, speaking of any projects on other land, “developers may see the referendum as a warning sign that a group of voters in Janesville may not like a particular project and work to get a referendum created on a new project.”
Council member Heather Miller said she was surprised the petition was not specific to data centers because it was in reaction to a data center proposal made in mid-2025 by Viridian Partners, a Colorado developer specializing in remediating blighted real estate.
Janesville was one of the few cities in the state that solicited offers for a data center, specifically on the GM/JATCO site, the Badger Institute reported in July 2025.
As was the case with the massive Microsoft data center project in Mount Pleasant and an even larger Vantage Data Center in Port Washington, Viridian negotiated privately with Janesville officials until they publicly outlined a proposal.
Viridian’s offered to purchase of the GM/JATCO site for $10 million and fully remediate it. As many as 11 data center buildings, $8 billion in investment, were proposed for the site.
When it became clear that a non-binding letter of intent had been reached in private and approved in public by the City Council in November 2025, the reaction was swift and angry.
In June, the City Council allowed Viridian’s letter of intent to lapse.
While the city changed the specific language of the petition a bit before putting it in referendum form, the decision to make the proposal specific to the GM/JATCO site and to include any kind of development of $450 million or more was the work of activists, Cathy Erdman told the Badger Institute.
Erdman said the $450 million figure was arrived at through “research,” but she wasn’t specific about what that research entailed. The GM/JATCO site, she said, is unique and deserves a separate, specific referendum question. But the public, she said, ought to be able to decide on major development, not just data center development.
“The point is not to prohibit development,” Erdman said. “It is to ensure that Janesville’s voters have direct input in major decisions about the GM/JATCO site and to facilitate community understanding, careful public scrutiny and broad support of projects that can reshape our city.”
History says developers who have for nearly two decades shunned the GM/JATCO site are not going to tolerate public interference with the development process, Godek, the finance director, said.
Direct legislation on this scale is rare in Wisconsin. As the Badger Institute reported in April, voters in Port Washington, where construction is underway on the biggest data center project in state history, passed a referendum giving voters a say in the future creation of routinely used tax increment financing districts.
That vote is being challenged in court.
Cullen understands that in their effort to educate voters before the Nov. 3 election, development advocates will be battling a wave of sentiment that, as Badger Institute reported in July, seems to run counter to voters’ best economic interests.
“I really think this referendum can be defeated,” said Cullen, who has supported the Badger Institute. “But what we’re seeing here is a much broader anti-development movement altogether.”
Mark Lisheron is a contributing journalist of the Badger Institute.
Any use or reproduction of Badger Institute articles or photographs requires prior written permission. To request permission to post articles on a website or print copies for distribution, contact Badger Institute Marketing Director Matt Erdman at matt@badgerinstitute.org.
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