The current water handling facility is “overfilled and outdated,” requiring many materials to be stored outside. (Mark Peterson)
At an informational presentation on August 28 at the East Side Maintenance Facility, 2635 University Ave. NE, Annika Bankston made a case for a replacement site for the city’s water handling headquarters. Bankston is the Director of the Water Treatment and Distribution division of the City’s Public Works Department; it has around 100 employees. The site chosen for a possible acquisition is a triangular 4.6-acre plot north of the East Side Maintenance building at 2705 University Ave NE. The division’s current headquarters is a 2.4-acre Southeast Minneapolis campus.
On August 22, the City Council authorized a grant application to the Minnesota Public Facilities Authority (MPFA) for a $4.5-million grant for the predesign, design, engineering and environmental analysis for a new Department of Public Works Water Distribution Facility. At the August 28 presentation, Bankston outlined the need for a new facility and talked about her division’s duties.
“We inspect repair valves, hydrants and the maintenance holes out in the system, and find and repair leaks. We have water loss and service connection inspectors that go anywhere water is coming up wherever it shouldn’t be. Those specialists are able to identify through our records those water sources and repair them. We also rehab water pipes throughout the city. If you see those yellow temporary pipes connected to hydrants and then excavations, that’s us doing our cleaning and lining work. And while that work itself is contracted out, a ton of support effort and other ancillary work goes on with doing all that water pipe rehabilitation. That’s all done by water distribution, installing the taps, turning services on and off at the curb.”
The division is responsible for 15,000 valves, 8000 fire hydrants and 100,000 customer accounts. It draws 20 billion gallons of water from the Mississippi River annually.
Bankston said her division also maintains all the records of the thousand miles of pipe, noting the locations and any previous work on them, along with the general administration functions of a water utility. But the mission doesn’t stop there. The division also inspects subcontractors’ work; it also disinfects and tests water quality and water mains before they go back into service. Water meters in residences and businesses are monitored and replaced when needed. Bankston added that the division is currently “in a big effort” to upgrade meter reading devices, which requires a lot of their staff to manage.
Bankston called their current facility at 935 5th Ave. SE “overfilled and outdated — photos don’t do it justice.” She said that at one point they considered double-stacking a construction trailer to gain more office space. The site is small enough that the division is paying $88,000 a year to lease parking spaces for employees. She added, “In the spaces we do have inside, we are stacking people. You have to be careful when you open doors, so you don’t knock somebody away from their workstation.” Sound panels have been added to reduce noise in four-person rooms. She describes the bathrooms as “inadequate,” and there is no ADA compliance.
“We are putting lockers along our garage walls for people to have their own locker, and we’ve got one really small conference room, and we have dozens of people working in and out of that office every day. One of our favorite break areas also doubles as a locker room. It’s where all our office furniture goes to be reused one last time before it actually is disposed of.”
One of the buildings is a former horse barn. The division maintains around 85 vehicles, from pickup trucks and vans to dump trucks, boom and evacuation trucks, backhoes and a front end loader (all of which need secure homes when not in use). Bankston added that the site has eight work stations in the buildings and another nine employees working from trailers. There are obsolete workshops and inadequate HVAC systems.
A map of the potential new site at 2705 University Ave. NE. (Mark Peterson)
Regarding the proposed new site, Barbara O’Brien, the city’s Director of Property services, said a non-binding letter of intent was executed in July and a draft purchase agreement has been finalized. Once the department is authorized to have a binding contract, there will be a 90-day period to begin planning environmental and traffic issues, all of which would happen before a final closing.
The current tenant of the 2705 University building, BagTape Closures, has occupied the site for decades, and O’Brien said that there may be a possibility of retaining them for a period. Their lease runs through January 2028, but the city will negotiate potential early termination options. Ultimately, the project will need City Council approval to go forward.
Because the new project would use the same entrance to University Avenue as the East Side Maintenance Facility, Bankston said attention needs to be paid to that intersection. There was an initial traffic study, and there is a conditional work permit, which was modified to deal with a projected increase in truck traffic.
Bankston said that, often during the search process, a property would come up for sale “that just felt like a compromise; wrong size, complicated access, et cetera. At this site we don’t have to compromise these critical items.”