Photo provided A view of the building at 1350 Arcadia Drive that the Columbus City Council approved purchasing and retrofitting for a new public works facility.
The purchase of the future home for the city’s public works and transit departments was approved by Columbus City Council members on Tuesday night.
Council members backed an expenditure of about $8.7 million the Columbus Redevelopment Commission is making to purchase the 20-acre property at 1350 Arcadia Drive and renovate the building for the new use. The city council has to sign off on any city expenditure greater than $500,000.
A resolution regarding the expenditure was approved 8-0. Council member Jay Foyst, R-District 6, was absent.
Director of Public Works Bryan Burton said his department has significantly outgrown capacity at the current city facility at 2250 Kreutzer Drive. Burton talked through a presentation outlining the need for the new facility, which several council members said was long overdue.
The Columbus Redevelopment Commission approved a purchase and sales agreement with Yinlun TDI, LLC for the former data center on May 20. The agreement was for $2.6 million, plus an additional $25,000 for closing costs. The property had been listed for $2.9 million, according to Director of Redevelopment Heather Pope. A couple of months later on August 19, the redevelopment commission met again and discussed a schematic design for the facility and the estimated associated costs to make it a reality.
The new facility is twice the size of public works’ current facility and will include a 15,000 square-foot building addition for maintenance, a 10,000 square-foot covered storage building addition and a nearly 2,000 square-foot addition for a wash building. It’s set to have a maintenance area with 10 service bays, two underground fuel tanks and would be able to house significantly more vehicles. It was estimated by Force Design that the upgrades to the site would cost an amount not to exceed $6.1 million.
The $8.7 million will come out of the city’s central tax increment financing (TIF) district, Pope said.
A pond on the site of the new facility would be turned into a park area and the facility would also feature a future connection to the People Trail.
“We’re planning to put a People Trail along Indianapolis Road to fill in a gap there and then when the property to the north is developed, they’ll put in their piece of it, and eventually we’ll have a complete connection,” Pope said.
Parking at the current facility is so limited that some city employees have to park at the transit depot on Lindsey Street and take a shuttle bus to get to the city garage. Burton said as well that only 6 of 10 maintenance bays at the current facility can be used and office space is so crowded upstairs that one part-time employee has her desk in a hallway. In addition, issues with the fire suppression system have popped up, most recently back in May when a pipe burst, flooding parts of the facility.
“We’ve just dealt with it for years, we’ve outgrown it, it’s at times very unsafe for our employees,” Burton told the council.
Although a significant amount of the property is located in the floodplain, Force Design’s Karen Walker said everything it would need could be built on the parts that aren’t in the floodplain.
Council President Frank Miller, R-District 4, discussed the amount of money the city has spent over the years “trying to keep the building usable” and observed that what’s spent on the new facility will be “money that’s going to be well spent.”
One thing Force Design’s schematic design didn’t include was a salt barn, which city council members indicated they would be open to approving an expenditure for.
Council member Elaine Hilber, D-District 2, noted it had been discussed previously just how inefficient it is for the salt barn to be located at 2250 Kreutzer Drive. A salt barn wasn’t included on the schematic design for the new site as a way to save money, Burton said.
As for the previous facility, Burton said they’re currently “planning to use the salt barn and the rest of it is to be determined.”
“You’ve got a parcel that you’re abandoning, you could sell it, give it back to the tax rolls,” Kent Anderson, R-District 5, suggested.
Miller also brought up the former Bartholomew County Highway Garage, which already has a salt barn. Recently, the Bartholomew County commissioners signed a letter of intent with the city to sell the 6-acre facility to the Columbus Redevelopment Commission for $1.075 million.
“I will get with the county supervisors, I was in a meeting with the county commissioners and that question came up, and I know that they had an engineer look at it. They’re looking to building a new salt barn at their facility,” Burton said.
But, because closing is scheduled to take place on or before September 30, members opted to consider the addition of a salt barn at the new site at a later time.
“We can come back with a salt barn request later,” Pope said. “This will get us going, so that we can still meet our required deadline.”
The project will be the first time the city has used the buy-operate-transfer (BOT) procurement method. BOT is a public/private partnership style of procurement method where a municipality enters into an agreement with a developer who is responsible for the design, construction and operation of a project. The developer operates the project for a certain time period before the project is transferred back over to a municipality.
Pope indicated they will now to seek to rezone the property to a lighter industrial classification at a later city council meeting.
