Van Horn buys Town of Sheboygan office building for $3.3 million
The building was home to Earth Tech and Donohue & Associates
TOWN OF SHEBOYGAN — Van Horn Automotive is breathing new life into the former Earth Tech office building.
Earlier this year, the Van Horn Automotive Group purchased the 57,000-square-foot building from Süd Family Limited Partnership for $3.3 million. According to Jeff Niesen, President & CEO of Van Horn, the company is consolidating their operations to the Town of Sheboygan from Plymouth.
The office campus first opened in 1971 when Donohue & Associates relocated their office from Downtown Sheboygan to North 40th Street in Erdman. The firm expanded and built three additional buildings on the campus, located north of Hardee’s.
Earth Tech Campus
Founded in 1910 as Jerry Donohue Engineering Company, the firm had an office in Downtown Sheboygan until moving into a newly constructed 25,000-square-foot office on North 40th Street in 1971. A quarter million dollar 8,000-square-foot addition was built in 1975. Both were constructed by Jos. Schmitt & Son Construction Company. In 1980, construction was started on a third and the most visible addition.
Completed in 1981, the $1.5 million two-story building featured the first commercial application of passive solar techniques in the Midwest. Donohue would later be sold to Wheelabrator Technologies, a subsidiary of Waste Management. In 1992, It was Wisconsin's largest engineering firm with 975 employees with 400 working out of the Technology Parkway campus.
The firm's name changed in 1993 to Rust Environment and Infrastructure. The company’s name would change again in 1998 when it was bought by California-based Earth Tech. AECOM acquired Earth Tech in 2009 and closed the office in 2014. Before the firm left Sheboygan, it had already began to downsize years prior.
In June 2004, the Earth Tech Erdman Building was sold to Lake Country Academy for $1.8 million. The Town of Sheboygan purchased the former Aero-Metric office for $600,000 from AECOM in October 2020 and after a renovation, moved the town offices into the building one year later. Aero-Metric, a subsidiary of Donohue & Associates and later Earth Tech, laid off 68 workers and closed the office in 2014.
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