State of the City 2022: Public Works Facility

The planned move for the City's Operations staff and workers from the Wantage Road Public Works yard to the old Sherman GM lot on Portage Avenue made for another theme from Tuesday's State of the City presentation. 

With the mayor providing an overview of the dire state of the current facility and the city's reasoning and hopes for for the new one.

"Another controversial decision I think that people are wondering about. 

You all have seen that we have acquired the old GM dealership to put public works there and I've heard a lot of feedback like why are you doing that?

So let me explain, this was Public Works. 

Public works was in a Health and Safety issue, in fact it was an unsafe working environment completely.  There was actually lines on the ground where you had to walk within the line so that you weren't in the unsafe zones in the complex. 

We brought in some ATCO trailers, as a kind of a make shift, those started failing right away, the reality was that this was a problem that was left for so long and when you're in the community you don't think of this as a priority. 

But us as an organization. we need a safe workplace for our workers, we need a place where they can actually have pride in their workplace. And we had to do something, it was a  very critical failure with that.

So it was either spend eight million dollars of money we don't have, because you know it needs to go into roads and water and waste treatment, and build a new capital building and find a site and clear a site and do all that, or do something more efficient."

From that outline, the Mayor then made his pitch towards the decision on taking on the lease to own concept for the former auto dealership.

"And that's when the GM opportunity came up, because now we're doing a lease to own opportunity with that building, the service bay fits out fire trucks and there's a lot of things that  worked with that building for us.

It was sitting there for two years, and we needed to make action, and that is actually going to save this community money and it means we don't have to do a massive capital project.

And we're going to use both yards, this will still be used for equipment and things like that, but that will be the new public works facility and that is why we moved forward with this, it was something that must happen.

And when you're in a position like this, if someone gets hurt on that, you know I'm not going to be a person who sits there and watches someone get hurt because I can't make a decision on getting them a new building.

So City staff came up with a creative solution and I think it was the right choice for this community to go in that direction and I hope after hearing that,  you believe so too"  

The Public works  elements of the presentation can be viewed from the City's Video replay of the Sate of the City Presentation.

The Public works notes start at the 30  minute mark

We outlined some of the background towards the proposed use of the property earlier this year.

Our Full overview of the State of the City Presentation can be reviewed here.

We also have created an archive of the elements from it, that compilation is available here.

( some of the above images come from screenshots of the video presentation)