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While the new Warsaw Public Works and Street Departments facility isn’t anticipated to be completed until summer 2027, the steel framework in place already provides an idea of just how large the building will be.
Public Works Director Dustin Dillon and Street Department Superintendent Joe Vetor provided a tour of the skeleton of the structure on West Center Street Thursday afternoon.
The front of the structure, facing West Center Street, will be where the offices will be located, including the main office where the public may stop in. There will be an employee breakroom and lockerroom.
“The rest of it will be street department offices downstairs. Upstairs will be more of the public works side of things. My office will be up there,” Dillon explained. “We’ll still have a road supervisor office. The sign shop will be one of these wings up here. A training room, and then we’ll eventually move the engineering department down here as well. GIS coordinator, the asset management coordinator, as well, so it’ll kind of be more public works upstairs, street department downstairs type of scenario.”
The wing behind the office area will be for the street department workers, as well as refuse and snow plow equipment “and things of that nature.” It has three large doors to move equipment in and out.
“So, 100-by-200-foot area; 20,000 square feet,” Dillon said. “We used to have our old shop over here, it was about 6,800 square foot total. So a little more than three times the size of what we had.”
It will have in-floor heat. “When the guys come back after snowplowing for 12 hours, when they come back 12 hours later, their truck hopefully will be completely thawed out and all the water and moisture will be evaporated from the floor by the time they get back. So if they need to change blades, we’re not laying underneath the truck that’s dripping all over us like we had for the last 20 years,” Dillon explained.
Moving west, the next wing of the building will basically be the mechanics shop/fleet services.
“So, they’ll have a parts mezzanine up there where they’ll stock all their parts. The smaller bay over there will be the oil room and just the supply room for waste oil, for hydraulic oil, all that stuff,” Dillon said. “A breakroom, office area for them to come in and look things up. Look up on the computer schematics and stuff.”
Another area will be house the overhead crane. There will be a fabrication bay as the departments are “more and more building our own trucks and things to save money,” he said.
Next, they showed where four drive-through bays will be.
“If they’re working on the ladder truck for the fire department, it’s obviously a 65-foot-long piece, and they’ll have plenty of room. But if they bring something in on one side that ‘hey, we’re waiting on parts’ or ‘we ran into a problem, we’re waiting on parts,’ they can still bring something in on the other side and still utilize that bay at the same time,” Dillon explained.
He estimated they could get at least eight vehicles in there at a time.
On the other side of a wall at the west end of the building is a drive-through wash bay.
“So we’ll have an automated underbody wash so it’ll be kind of spraying as you’re coming through to spray the sides of the truck and the bottom off of it, but then we’ll also have a 5-foot catwalk on each side with the power wash where the guys can go up and wash the tops of trucks, the beds, all that scenario, but it’ll also be drive-through where we can drive all the way through it,” Dillon stated.
It’ll still be manual wash, but a lot more user-friendly, he said.
There are still a couple buildings on the property that have yet to be taken down once everything is moved over. Those buildings include the shop, the brine-making building and the current office building. The new brine building will be 50 feet by 128 feet.
“All of this will leave us an extra 20-30 years to grow to the west if we need to. But this will all turn into parking lot,” Dillon said.
Vetor pointed toward some white storage buildings toward the north of the property that will remain. “We’re going to utilize that for asphalt, concrete bay, and then our packer bay for our trash trucks,” he said.
Storage doors 1-4 are the current mechanic shop. A couple others are storage for all the oils from all the different applications they do, while the last two doors are the fabrication area, Vetor said.
“We’ll keep all the paving equipment, the concrete equipment, things of that nature, street sweepers, will all still be kept back there instead of bringing the dirty stuff into the new facility,” Dillon said.
Most of the new $12.5 million facility is one story, except for the office area and the parts mezzanine.
“They’re shooting for a completion date still of July 2027, last we discussed it,” Dillon said, adding he thought they were still on track despite the weather. Robinson Construction is building the facility. “I wouldn’t say we’re ahead of the game, but ... all of it just takes time.”
All the sanitary and stormwater at the facility will be drastically improved, Dillon mentioned.
Roughly 45 city employees will be working out of the new facility at the start.
“It’ll be big, that’s for sure,” Dillon said.
Next week, they’re supposed to be pouring concrete, as well as start putting up the metal siding.
Dillon said everyone is excited about the project. Even with an addition added on to the current facility, it was not user-friendly as far as the dump trucks and other large vehicles the two departments have.
“It was all piece-mealed together. So to have a blank canvas of 100 by 200 shop, it’s just going to be a life-changer because the construction season set-ups versus the winter time set-ups will be completely different, so that’s why we decided kind of the importance of just having a clear-span building would be the most ideal because we can change the set-ups, depending on the season,” Dillon stated.
When they started working with an architect on the building back in January 2020, he said they did a full inventory of every asset they had and the architect “designed a footprint of what was needed square footage-wise, and then we kind of factored in with annexations, added employees, different stuff,” Dillon said. “So on the streets, you have 22 employees right now, not counting refuse. ... You add in refuse you end up with about 26. And we designed (the facility) for like 42 employees, so we left ourselves a little bit of room for expansion. It’ll make a big difference.
“Everybody’s pretty excited to get it done, it’s just going to take some time.”
It’s hoped they’ll be able to work out of the street department side of the building by this winter, though the offices won’t be fully finished, but “we’ll be able to work out of the building by this winter. So that will be a huge savings for us,” Dillon said.
As the city grows, the public works and street departments will have to grow with it.
“As the city grows, you’re going to have to be able to respond to that. You’ve got Slate Auto coming into town, Autocam (Medical), the Tech Park is always adding something out there. There’s 2,000-plus jobs and people have to have some place to live or else they’re commuting back and losing revenue. Our goal is to be able to support all of that,” Dillon said.
“Not to mention all the housing additions that are going on,” Vetor said. “It’s just adding mileage that we’ve got to maintain.”
That’s not only road, stormwater and sanitary sewer mileage that’s got to be maintained, but also refuse, yard waste and recycling collections.
“It takes people and it takes equipment to do those things,” Dillon said. “Hopefully, this will have us set up for many, many decades, but Warsaw is a growing and thriving community.”
