JANESVILLE — For more than a decade, the farmland at the corner of Highway 26 and McCormick Drive sat on the market with little interest.
Now, as the Vlogý City Council prepares for an Aug. 10 final vote on the first phase of the McCormick Crossing development, city engineers are still working through unresolved questions about how the land will handle stormwater.
The corner has been listed for sale for more than 13 years, according to Adam Shultz, owner and managing broker at Coldwell Banker Commercial McGuire Mears & Associates who has marketed several sections of the land.
For most of that time, he said, the edge of the city simply didn’t have the housing demand to draw builders, and retailers gravitated instead toward busier corridors near Highway 26 and Humes Road.
The intersection is now the last signalized crossing on Milton Avenue with two developable sites still open, and commercial buyers are drawn to what the corner offers.
“Companies like hard corners and visibility,” Shultz said. “It’s a busy intersection as you head to Milton.”
Prices among the roughly 130 acres involved vary widely by parcel, from about $300,000 for a narrower lot suited to duplexes or townhomes up to $1.3 million for one corner site.
A 4.3-acre parcel where Kwik Trip plans a gas station, convenience store and car wash doesn’t need a rezoning to move forward with a staff recommendtion for the Plan Commission to approve a conditional use permit (CUP).
The commission approved the CUP unanimously, but city staff have flagged unresolved technical issues with the project’s stormwater management plan, which was a part of the traffic impact analysis report for the area, that remain open as the broader development heads toward a council vote.
Among them: engineering reviewers noted that the developer’s calculations for removing suspended solids from runoff — requiring an 80% standard — excluded certain “undetained greenspace” from the math, which is what allowed the design to reach that threshold on paper.
The city’s review asked the developer to recalcultate using all of the site’s runoff rather than carving out that greenspace. A separate stormwater management maintenance agreement is also still under review, with city comments on it still pending. On the grading side, reviewers raised concerns about a drainage swale planned along the sidewalk on the site’s southeast corner, calling the current design “not desirable” and suggesting the area instead be graded as a low point that funnels runoff into an existing storm pipe.
None of that is explicitly tied, in city records reviewed so far, to the flash flooding that hit Vlogý and Rock County on April 17, when several inches of rain fell in a matter of hours, flooding streets more than three feet deep and prompting both the city and county to declare emergencies.
Whether those storms has changed how the city reviews stormwater plans for new development is a remaining question.
The September 2025 traffic impact analysis breaks the project into two stages, starting with an initial phase that includes 162 townhomes or condos, 63 apartment units and the commercial parcel with Kwik Trip alongside a coffee shop and fast-food restaurant. The second phase, running through 2035, adds 195 single-family homes, 234 more townhomes or condos, 183 additional multi-family units and a shopping plaza.
Alongside the housing, the city’s plans call for widening McCormick Drive into a boulevard and putting in a roundabout at McCormick and Huntinghorne Drive.
The Kwik Trip permit and the associated rezoning recommendation now go to the City Council for a final vote Aug. 10.