The City of Janesville has responded publicly to emails that surfaced this week showing the city began privately communicating with data center developers who were eyeing the former General Motors site a year before the city had full ownership of the property.
A May 18, 2026 article in The Gazette described the response. According to the story:
In a Facebook-posted statement the city published Friday afternoon — and then emailed to The Gazette — the city criticizes the newspaper’s May 14 news coverage of the emails.
Many of the emails which show a back-and-forth between the city and developer Viridian Partners over an emerging data center proposal at the former GM site.
Viridian sought to discuss the prospect with the city starting in 2024. Those initial talks progressed through early 2025, in the months prior to the city formally taking ownership of the 240-acre GM site through an eminent domain buyout. The GM site’s prior owner, Commercial Development Company, had resisted the buyout for months.
The city lays out a timeline in which it characterizes communications it had with Viridian and others prior to the city actually having ownership control of the contaminated GM site as “preliminary inquiries.”
The Gazette obtained the emails from neighborhood watchdog group SNOW Janesville. SNOW said it obtained the documents May 12, following an open records request it filed seven months ago.
The city overturned the emails after SNOW threatened legal action last month.
The City of Janesville did not gain full ownership control of the former property until mid-2025. But starting in mid-2024 — a full year prior — the city started to have private, back-and-forth communications with Virdian and others on data center prospects at the former GM site.
In a July 14, 2025 city memo that came days after the city publicly announced it had secured formal jurisdictional acquisition of the GM site, the city said it had been “approached by potential data centers when the news of our acquisition became public.”
The city did not disclose at that time that it had been communicating with Viridian and others for months, with some talks mentioning data centers spanning back to mid-2024.
In the city’s Facebook post, which was identical to a statement it sent to The Gazette on Friday, the city states:“The emails cited in the article reflect a developer in the preliminary inquiry phase, receiving routine responsive communication from the city.” The city wrote in its statement that The Gazette’s report “incorrectly treats a developer reaching out for initial fact-finding as equivalent to negotiation. There is a distinct difference between the inquiry phase and the elapsed period of time when Viridian came back to the community to participate in the RFP (in July 2025).”
The Gazette report does not state the city was formally negotiating prior to the RFP. It characterizes Viridian’s and the city’s contacts prior to the city taking control of the GM site as “emails” and “talks.” The report cites emails between the city and Viridian from March and April 2025 that show Viridian wanted to know when the city would get control of the property, telling the city at that time that “data center development depends on how early you can get in the power queue.”
That was a reference to Viridian’s eagerness to line up electrical capacity evaluations with regional utility provider Alliant Energy. Viridian officials expressed interest at that time in grabbing a flight in from Colorado to Janesville to meet with city officials to discuss the GM site and its potential viability for development.
On May 1, 2025 — months prior to the city announcing publicly on July 8, 2025 that it had official ownership of the GM site — Viridian Partners sent the city an email with multiple attachments containing what the company at that time called a “proposal.”
The email records The Gazette obtained do not include the contents of Viridian’s apparent May 2025 proposal.
The city received that email months prior to mid-July 2025, when the city asked the Janesville city council and got the OK for a formal RFP process to solicit data center development proposals for the GM site.
The Gazette article explains that the city of Janesville’s economic development division has discretion under city rules to confidentially discuss private development prospects.
The article was published on The Gazette’s news website on Thursday evening, about three hours after The Gazette had reached out to the city of Janesville for comment. The city did not respond until publishing a Facebook post and emailing a matching statement to The Gazette on Friday afternoon.
