Public Works and Parks space needs
Why does Roseville need a new Public Works and Parks Operations Facility?
In 2016 when the City Council at the time was made aware of the facility and space needs for Public Works and Parks and Recreation, they started having serious policy discussions about how to address them.
“We knew we needed more space. We also know our facilities are old. So the decision point is, do we start investing in these facilities?” said City Manager Pat Trudgeon. “Do we look at a new facility that’s laid out more efficiently, has adequate space, is more environmentally sustainable?”
The original maintenance building was built in1957 at 5,400 square feet and has been expanded over several stages to reach its current size of 61,800 square feet. The last expansion was 20 years ago in 2004. The facilities have been used for various purposes over the years. For instance, a room currently used for storage used to be the police department’s shooting range.
“These things are expensive so we try to get a useful life out of them before replacing them,” said Trudgeon.
Though separate departments with different work loads and responsibilities, the Parks and Public Works departments work very closely together, sharing space and equipment as much as it is logical and possible to do. The City employs about 35 employees between Public Works and Parks. In the summer, the number of employees doubles for seasonal work. The employees use the vehicles and equipment to maintain City streets and utilities, as well as city parks, trails, and recreation programs and facilities.
“Here is a place with all the things that make a city work, that people don’t really think of. You need a boat, you need pumps, you need specialized equipment for different times of the year. And you need a place to keep them,” said Trudgeon.
Department Storage
The City’s supply of over 350 pieces of equipment is currently too large to be fully housed in the current facilities. This equipment includes pickup trucks, snow plows, mowers, sweet sweepers, trailers, a water truck, boats, construction vehicles, and more. When all the vehicles come in from a day’s work, every parking space is full—and so are the drive lanes and maintenance yard.
Currently there’s only one way to drive in and out, which creates inefficiencies when the specific vehicle needed is parked three cars deep. Ideally, there would be both an entrance and an exit, with access via additional drive lanes, according to Public Works Director Jesse Freihammer.
“We’re at a point where we can’t add more vehicles that we need because there isn’t enough indoor storage space to keep them. Obviously in Minnesota, that’s important in the winter,” said Parks and Recreation Director Matthew Johnson.
Tools and equipment such as water pumps, leaf blowers, weed whips, hoses, shovels, rakes, and all sorts of tools and equipment are stacked on shelves, closets, and along every wall of the maintenance buildings.
“It can look like controlled chaos, but most of the stuff here is here for a reason,” said Johnson.
In addition to places to park the vehicles, the Public Works and Parks departments have onsite maintenance and repair bays, a wash bay, a fueling station, meter and sign shops, admin offices, locker rooms, and storage for bulk stock of salt, sand, fertilizer, and materials for repairing roads, water mains, sewer lines, sidewalks, and trails, among other things.
“Every piece of equipment we have, we can maintain here,” said Freihammer. This includes Public Works and Parks vehicles and equipment as well as fire engines and police squads.
The wash bay for cleaning off equipment and vehicles is outdated and too small for a lot of the vehicles, which have increased in size over the years. Equipment like snow plows and lawn mowers need to be hosed down and washed every time they are used to maintain their quality and extend the useful life of the equipment. When a snow plow needs to be washed, it can’t fit into the space.
“It sticks out and it isn’t [cleaned] very well,” said Freihammer. And since snow plows are used when it’s cold, the water creates a lot of ice where it wouldn’t be if the wash bay was an adequate size, he explained.
Maintenance Yard
The yard is a multi-purpose outdoor space used for vehicle circulation in and out of the buildings, as well as a space to store rotating piles of materials. The yard is currently 59,000 sq feet, which hasn’t kept up with the increase in size of the buildings or number of vehicles that use the space. Freihammer said they need at least double the space they currently have. In the pre-design plan for the new facility, the yard is 134,000 sq feet.
A pile of busted up concrete from a construction project is taking up space currently, before eventually being disposed of. Garbage that is dumped on the side of the road or in parks is gathered up by City staff and temporarily stored at the maintenance facility yard too. Salt and sand for plowing is stored year-round on the yard, and in the winter there’s a pile of snow too.
The City currently uses some additional space owned by Ramsey County for materials needed for water line repairs and other construction projects. They don’t expect Ramsey County will let them use their space indefinitely.
“Getting more yard space will give us an opportunity to store our own material,” Johnson explained.
A small pile of ballfield aggregate is stored in a makeshift area between concrete blocks, next to traffic cones and a pile of wood pallets, because there wasn’t space for it anywhere else, Johnson explained.
“To be honest, that’s not enough of a load. Come spring time, we need to do multiple orders,” Johnson said.
The yard is also the location of the fuel station for all City vehicles, and is “past its life expectancy” according to Freihammer. It needs to be replaced, but the City has been waiting to find out if it will be replaced in its current location or in a new one before investing in improvements.
Vehicles enter the yard and maintenance facility via Woodhill Drive, through an entrance that is currently not secure. There is no gate to keep people from walking or driving in, even though it’s not a public entrance. Updated security is part of the plan for the proposed new maintenance facility.
Parks department storage
In addition to tools and equipment needed for maintaining parks and trails, the Parks and Recreation department stores sports equipment and other supplies needed for programs throughout the year.
“Every nook and cranny we have is now used for storage,” Johnson said.
This includes anything from softball bases to soccer nets, pinnies to basketballs, and craft supplies to tubas.
These supplies are stored in different locations across the city, including multiple sections of the current maintenance facility, the city-owned strip mall at the intersection of Lexington and Woodhill, rented storage space on the western side of Roseville, and leased space from the Minnesota State Fairgrounds. Roseville is currently paying over $60,000 a year for rented storage space, according to this January 9, 2023 Request for Council Action. Parks storage has been shuffled around to different buildings over the years too, such as the former Fairview Community Center and decommissioned Fairview Fire Station.
“With 680 acres of parkland there’s a lot that goes into it every day to keep it up. People work very hard at it and there’s a lot of specialized equipment. Like filling the gardens in Central Park—that [requires] equipment. It all adds up,” said Johnson.
License and Passport Center needs
The City of Roseville owns the retail space that currently houses the Passport and License Center. Previously, the City was renting the space for over $100,000 a year. In 2018, the City Council decided it would be better to own the space than to keep paying rent. However, the building has only half the space needed, according to an analysis by the BKV Group.
“With license and passport centers closing in nearby cities, the demand for services at the Roseville center is expected to surge over the next few years, but the current building lacks the space needed to support a growing customer base,” according to the Invest in Roseville website.
The space is noisy and crowded, and staff doesn’t have adequate room for their needs. For instance, one of the only enclosed rooms is used and rearranged for multiple purposes, such as a conference room, breakroom, meeting room, training room, and interview room.
Every year, the Center completes 185,000 transactions for driver’s licenses, vehicle tabs, vehicle titles, hunting and fishing licenses, and passports annually.
According to Mayor Dan Roe, the Center brings in up to $200,000 or more of revenue over expenses each year to help pay for other city costs.
The City’s dance program also has a studio in the same retail center.
“This dates back to when we were in Fairview for our dance classes. When Aŋpétu Téča was built, the space allocation changed. This was right around the same time the Council purchased [the License Center] site,” said Johnson. “There was a vacant space so we turned it into our dance studio. We have about 200 participants in our dance program. It’s a real small space.”
The Vision for a New Facility
In collaboration with City staff, the City Council, and external consultants, a vision for a new facility for Parks and Recreation and Public Works has developed since 2016. The current plan is to build a new facility on city-owned land that is currently occupied by Veterans Park, the VFW, and the city-owned retail space that contains the License and Passport Center, in addition to parks storage and the city’s dance studio.
In some early design concepts, the City considered ways to renovate the existing maintenance building space without moving to another piece of property. But those concepts were ruled out—the expense was not worth the proposed improvements since they didn’t resolve all the problems, Trudgeon said.
The new Public Works & Parks Operations Facility would give the departments adequate space to meet their current and future needs for maintenance and storage facilities. Additionally, the departments will gain new office space for their administration. This will create efficiencies for the City and a unified Civic Campus.
In order to do this, the VFW and the city-owned strip of retail shops will come down and the current tenants relocated. The City has presented a vision for a new building on south side of Woodhill to house the city’s Passport and License Center, with a recreational space above. According to the proposal to the state legislature, this space will be home to the “Roseville School of Dance, various adult wellness classes such as yoga and mindfulness and could be available to community and non-community users when not in use for City programs.”
Next door to this building will be a new and improved VFW and green space.
“If we do it right, this is a 50-plus year decision that is going to hold for, maybe even longer than that,” Trudgeon said.
The design as shown in the above image is the “pre-design plan” that was presented to City Council in 2022 by the external design group. However, a lot of details are left to be determined, according to Trudgeon. City staff and City Council will work with architects and contractors, in conversation with Roseville residents, to adjust and finalize the design after funding is secured for the project.
Financing the project
Building a new maintenance and storage facility for Public Works and Parks, and a new building for the License & Passport Center, is estimated to cost up to $76.9 million, not including interest and bond issuance costs over a 20 year period. The exact cost of the project will be determined after a final design is approved and contracts for the work are awarded, but the estimate is the maximum amount, according to Trudgeon.
Rather than expecting Roseville residents to foot the bill with their property taxes, the City Council decided to ask Roseville residents for approval to add a half percent local sales tax. Sixty-four percent of the revenue generated by the local sales tax would be paid by nonresidents, adding up to approximately $49 million of the construction costs, according to a study by the University of Minnesota Extension. The study also estimated that if this sales tax had been in effect in 2021, each Roseville resident would have paid, on average, an additional $55.48 in sales tax in 2021.
In order to get Legislative approval to put it on the ballot, the City needed to demonstrate that the Public Works and Parks facility and the License Center had regional benefit. The case was made that Roseville is a regional shopping destination and its 32 parks and trails are a regional attraction as well. Therefore, according to the proposal, non-residents should help pay for the maintenance of the roads, utilities, and parks that would be better served by an updated maintenance facility. Additionally, an increasing number of residents from surrounding cities travel to Roseville to use the License and Passport Center, so they should help pay for the new building for that too. You can read the full proposal submitted to the Legislature here.
Voting is already underway on the two ballot questions put before Roseville residents. Two questions, one for each building project, would result in a total of a half percent sales tax to fund both projects.
As to whether or not residents could vote on this again, the answer is complicated. Getting legislative approval for another chance at funding it with a sales tax could be difficult, given their current moratorium on local sales tax proposals and the associated task force to examine their use. Trudgeon explained that levying a property tax increase to pay for the project could happen with or without a referendum, depending on how the City Council chooses to issue bonds for the project and how they choose to pursue resident support.
“We hope that people understand we’re bringing this to the people for a vote. It’s their choice. And whatever their choice is, is what we’ll do moving forward . . . we’re putting it to the people. If there’s support there’s support. If there’s not, we’ll go back to the drawing board,” Trudgeon said.
Early voting in the 2024 General Election is currently underway. The final day to vote is Tuesday, November 5.
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