Excerpted from madison.com
By Lindsay Christians

A few years ago, Waunakee’s Main Street looked tired.

In 2014, a long-awaited $4 million reconstruction led by the Wisconsin Department of Transportation ripped up a mile’s worth of Main, from Holiday Drive on the west to Division Street on the east. Crews resurfaced and rebuilt the street. They added bike lanes, improved intersections, updated street lights and installed planters.

Even before the work was done, investors began to take notice.

Village administrator Todd Schmidt estimates that little Waunakee has seen more than $18 million in new private investment and reinvestment combined in the downtown area, all during the last two years.

About a quarter of new investment has been residential, notably a new 75-unit apartment complex at Madison and Main.

Then in mid-June, Lone Girl Brewing Company opened at 114 E. Main St., with a large main dining area, beer brewed on premise and a rooftop that seats some 100 people.

Along with new businesses have come new events, like a family-centric Fourth of July celebration called WaunaBoom, and Live from the Park, a summer concert series. Each Tuesday evening through July 26, bands play and food carts come to the Village Park Gazebo.

There are also new public art projects. Now in its second year, Barns on Main showcases the work of local artists on 15 metal barns lining the downtown street.

With cute shops, village-centric events and a focus on creativity, Waunakee is poised to become a small town destination.

Every day, some 16,600 cars drive along East Main Street, according to a 2015 traffic study by the Wisconsin DOT.

A commercial leakage study conducted last year reported that “Waunakee businesses seem to be capturing about 30 percent of the retail potential within the Waunakee area,” compared to 94 percent in Cottage Grove, 83 percent in McFarland and 69 percent in Oregon.

“It’s just shocking how much this community goes elsewhere to spend its money,” said Kevin Abercrombie, a co-owner of Lone Girl Brewing Company. “These numbers were important for us to realize that this was worth the investment.”

Lone Girl is among the most ambitious projects Waunakee has ever seen. A nearly 7,000-square-foot main floor includes a kitchen and keg room, and the rooftop patio seats 125 people.

“Others are going to come around us,” Abercrombie said. “And that’s great. The more the merrier — we become a destination, it helps everybody.”

Many of Waunakee’s new businesses were lured to the area by the efforts of two people: Todd Schmidt, who serves both as village administrator and economic development director, and Don Tierney, a developer and Waunakee native.

What’s next for Waunakee?

“Waunakee is a residential, family community. The board and plan commission plan to see very controlled growth at a Waunakee scale, smaller developments.”

The village wants more people to stay in town to shop and entertain themselves, true. But it doesn’t make sense to ignore the resources that are already there.

“We’re not creating a new mall to add to our regional economy or a new Greenway Station. Those exist and we can go there and enjoy them. The lines betwen Waunakee and other dense urban centers are not going to blur together — we’re going to be a unique, identifiable, special little place.”

Read the full article.

PRESS RELEASE

Madison Region Economic Partnership (MadREP) shared today the full results of its 2016 Workplace Diversity & Inclusion Survey. This survey captures quantitative and qualitative data about workforce demographics, supplier diversity programs, and community engagement among companies in the eight-county Madison Region. It also provides companies with a vehicle to self-assess strengths and opportunities relative to diversity in their workforce.

MadREP first launched this annual survey in 2015 in alignment with the Advance Now Strategy for economic growth, which includes Leadership & Diversity as one of its five main planks. Last year’s inaugural survey marked the first time an assessment of this type had taken place in the Madison Region, and the 2016 survey built upon that momentum.

“The inclusion of a diverse workforce is vital to the sustained economic growth of the Madison Region,” notes Paul Jadin, president at MadREP. “Assessing the progress of diversity and inclusion efforts by employers is a critical step in improving our practices.”

MadREP partnered with the Survey Research Center at UW-River Falls to increase the validity and response rate of this year’s survey. The survey was sent to a random sample of 2,464 employers in the eight-county region with 10 or more employees between February – April 2016. The survey received 358 responses for a margin of error of ±5.06%. A summary of initial survey results was released on May 9 at the Madison Region’s Economic Development & Diversity Summit, co-hosted by MadREP and the Urban League of Greater Madison.

Complete survey results, including an executive summary and data sets, are available at madisonregion.org/diversitysurveyreport.

The survey was sponsored by Ho-Chunk Gaming Madison.

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Excerpted from Wisconsin State Journal
By Jeff Glaze

American Packaging Corp., maker of flexible packaging for a wide variety of food, healthcare, hygiene and household products, plans to build a plant in DeForest and add as many as 300 employees there over the next decade.

American Packaging has more than 600 employees across three plants in Columbus, Wisconsin, Rochester, New York and Story City, Iowa. With a lack of adjacent developable land adjacent to the company’s Columbus plant, executives strongly considered expanding their Iowa plant.

Sam Blahnik, community development director for DeForest, said an incentive package that includes up to $750,000 in Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. tax credits and nearly $1.9 million in tax increment financing incentives (TIF) from the village helped secure a new plant in Dane County.

“Through the process the state of Iowa was very aggressive so it was very encouraging to see our state do what the could to allow this expansion to remain within our state’s borders,” Blahnik said, adding company executives have assured the state that the DeForest plant will not spell misfortune for Columbus.

“These are all new positions, new growth. They swore they were not going to shut down any of the Columbus operations,” he said.

Construction is already underway on the first, 165,000-square-foot phase, just west of Highway 51 on the village’s northern edge. It is expected to create more than 60 jobs and be operable by early next year.

Three subsequent phases are expected increase the building’s footprint to at least 400,000 square feet by the end of 2026. The additions are expected to accommodate about 300 jobs.

Read the full story.

Excerpted from Janesville Gazette
By Neil Johnson

The 1 million-square-foot Dollar General distribution center rising on Janesville’s south end is still months from opening its doors.

The warehouse will be the biggest ever built in Rock County and employ more than 550 workers.

On just one side, the Dollar General warehouse will have some 75 truck bays to load dozens of semitrailer trucks a day and send them outbound to Interstate 90/39—the big, concrete-paved artery the retailer will use to transport items from Janesville to 1,000 retail stores in its Midwest network.

The $75 million Dollar General warehouse might be so large that it tricks the eye, but it’s no illusion. Rather, it’s an embodiment of the growth of warehousing and distribution, an industrial sector in Rock County that’s creating a promise of new jobs at a pace that few other job sectors here can match.

At least seven new companies that rely on distribution and warehousing as a significant portion of their operations have opened in Rock County since 2011, mainly in Janesville and Beloit, bringing in 350 new jobs, according to records obtained through the county office of economic development.

In Janesville alone, new warehousing and distribution operations are on pace to create at least 700 new jobs over the next two years.

That would account for as much as 10 percent of the new growth in jobs that economic development analysts have reported and forecast in Rock County’s half-decade climb out of recession.

And some of those new jobs come with starting pay of $16 or $17 an hour. That’s applying upward pressure on average blue-collar wages, which in Rock County have seen sluggish growth even as the local economy has recovered from the Great Recession and the shutdown of the General Motors assembly plant.

Forward Janesville President John Beckord has favored distribution and warehouse developments for years.

Beckord calls warehousing and distribution a “smart niche” for Janesville to develop a stable and diverse job market. It’s something private developers and economic development officials have worked to do for nearly a decade in the wake of Janesville’s loss of GM as a major employer for blue-collar workers.

Read the full article.

Excerpted from WisBusiness.com
By Polo Rocha

The Madison region has a long way to go to fix longstanding economic disparities, but it must start by bringing the community together, experts agree.

That’s why Manuel Pastor, a University of Southern California professor, called yesterday’s MadREP and Urban League of Greater Madison summit a “remarkable thing.” Pastor noted while the Madison economy is growing, the city is “doing pretty badly” in leaving some people behind.

And economic development leaders, he said, need to ensure their efforts target those disparities.

“This is not something that’s an add-on,” Pastor said. “It’s fundamental and key to economic growth.”

The summit came as MadREP released a survey showing diversity and inclusion numbers among employers in the region who responded. The survey found men made up 68.6 percent of company leadership positions and 64.9 percent of board of director spots.

It also found 90 percent of respondents don’t have a staff member dedicated to diversity, and 86 percent of respondents don’t have a written diversity statement. Only 2 percent of respondents, meanwhile, said they have a supplier diversity program.

The third annual summit featured discussions on such topics, bringing more than 500 community and business leaders across the eight-county Madison region to Monona Terrace.

“I think it was a success,” Urban League President & CEO Ruben Anthony said after the event. “We really found a way to marry diversity and inclusion and economic development in a way that’s probably not happening in a lot of other places around the country.”

That’s important, said Assistant U.S. Secretary of Commerce Jay Williams, because the regions that succeed are the ones that “wholly embrace and encourage diversity and inclusion.”

But it’s easier said than done, and there’s still much more research needed on how to make sure there’s a more diverse pool of entrepreneurs, said Yasuyuki Motoyama, the director of Research and Policy at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

Read the full article.