Will the city move its main Public Works facility?
The City of Saratoga Springs sits on property worth millions, and they may cash in
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Over four acres of prime real estate in Saratoga Springs will be coming up for sale if the Saratoga Springs Department of Public Works gets its wish. The department is proposing to move its main facility, a collection of garages, other worksite buildings and truck parking lots, from the northwest corner of Division and Van Rensselaer streets to Weibel Avenue, near the city’s ice skating rink and industrial property leased from the city by the National Grid electric company.
The 4.2 acre space sits just north of the Division Street Elementary School and within an easy walk of a home listed for $500,000 on the Zillow real estate app, with other nearby houses listed in the range of $1.2 to $1.6 million, according to Zillow.
Deputy Commissioner of Public Works Tad Roemer told the city council at their June 17 meeting that the main building at the current facility was built in 1975.
“Fifty years of dirt and salt have taken their toll,” Roemer said. The main building has holes in the walls, ruined door jambs, broken floors and more problems. Further, Roemer said that keeping the building and the work bays warm in the winter is difficult given the gaps in the walls, doors and windows.
The DPW facility — the Charles A. McTygue Memorial Garage — runs at all hours of the day, especially during big snow storms, and often has idling trucks on the property. A sand pile and a salt garage sit in one corner, and it’s used for police, fire and DPW vehicles to refill their fuel tanks.
By contrast, the surrounding neighborhood consists of single family homes, the elementary school, ball fields and a community pool.
“One of these things doesn’t belong, and it’s the DPW facility,” Roemer told the board. It does not fit in the neighborhood — and it is too expensive to fix, given the value of the land it sits upon.
“The adjacent neighborhood would probably be really happy to see us relocated,” he said.
He also said that modern facilities house trucks in garages to avoid sitting exposed to the weather.
Although the city council was largely approving of the idea, this was the first presentation to the council, so neither the sale nor the placement of the new facility has been approved.
Public Works Commissioner Charles “Chuck” Marshall told the council that improving the property is a financially bad idea as the current property alone “is worth several million dollars.”
Still, he asked the board if they wanted cost estimates of repairs.
Commissioner of Finance Minita Sanghvi agreed that repairs were not the way to go, but she was hoping to get a better sense of the cost of moving and building, along with a sense of how the property might be used in the future. She said that in a perfect situation, the costs involved would be either net 0 or a net-positive for the city.
Other issues discussed were the exact nature of the sale of the property and what sort of use (i.e. affordable housing, single family homes, commercial uses) would be allowed on the evacuated property — and even what else the city might move to the new location along with DPW.
“There are ways that we could benefit in multiple ways from this,” Commissioner of Accounts Dillon Moran said.
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