By Lee Reinsch
Correspondent
DE PERE – Capital Credit Union apparently has been “doing the right thing,” as its TV commercial ditty suggests.
The 91-year-old credit union is opening another facility, consisting of a full-service credit union branch with ATM and an operations tower, at 1121 W. Main Ave. in Ashwaubenon, just outside of De Pere.
Capital purchased the former SparkNET building for $6 million this year. It will invest another $2 million into renovating the existing building and building the new onsite branch. Keller is the builder.
All Green Bay-area branches, including the one at 108 S. Fifth Street on the east side of De Pere, will remain open and unchanged.
“This will be an office operations center, and it will be our 27th branch office as well,” said Capital Credit Union President Tom Young. “This is a four-story – five-stories if you include the lower level – 70,000-square-foot office building, in which we will house a lot of our back-office operations.”
Capital’s mortgage, training and facilities departments, its communications and support centers, plus its IT department, will be moving to the new site by the end of April or early May, when the project should be completed, Young said. Its fleet of nine courier vans will be housed in the heated underground garage.
Most of those departments are located in the corporate headquarters at 825 Morris Ave. in Ashwaubenon. The headquarters will remain where it is.
“We’re at full capacity here at this office in Ashwaubenon (at 825 Morris Ave.) so it will free up capacity at this office to grow corporate,” Young said.
Capital had planned to build a multi-story operations center next to its corporate headquarters, but then the SparkNET building became available, Young said.
It’s a tall, black building with lots of glass window frontage and a horizontal red stripe across the top.
“It’s really a very striking building,” Young said. “It was an internet company that owned it, so it’s all wired and high tech, a very nice building. And the price was right.”
The $8 million expenditure is about 60 percent less than what the cost would have been to build a new facility near its Morris Avenue headquarters as Capital had originally planned, according to Young.
Last year, Capital opened a branch in Ledgeview.
So in addition to the existing branch at 108 S. Fifth Street on De Pere’s west side, the De Pere area will have three Capital Credit Union branches once the SparkNET project is finished.
“We’re growing very well – our membership is growing, our assets are growing, and we’ve been very successful,” Young said.
Around 100 of Capital Credit Union’s 390 employees will work at the SparkNET building site.
Capital has 110,000 members and assets of $1.5 billion, according to Young. Its 27 offices span from Sturgeon Bay to Oshkosh.
Since Capital’s logo colors are black and red, they’ll keep the red stripe on the building, Young said.