Grant Co. PUD plans potential facility moves

EPHRATA — Grant County Public Utility District officials are hoping to identify tentative locations for new equipment shops in Moses Lake and Ephrata by the end of 2022. Utility district officials also plan to replace the PUD headquarters building, with the work on all three projects scheduled to take about a decade.

“We looked at what we would need in the future, 30 years out, and what it would take (to remodel) at each of the facilities we’re in now. They’ve reached the point where new facilities are the best value, both from a cost standpoint and the function of what we need,” Tim Fleisher, PUD facilities manager said.

He added that there is only a preliminary cost estimate, about $266 million for all three projects. Utility district officials haven’t identified possible sites or commissioned any designs, Fleisher said.

“It’s the starting target of what we think something like this would cost,” he said.

Utility district commissioners reviewed the facilities master plan during the April 26 commission meeting.

“What we wanted to do was build a road map for the future of our facilities,” Fleisher said.

An exact timeline for the projects also hasn’t been determined.

“We’d like to, at least from a very preliminary design standpoint, do all three designs at the same time,” Fleisher said. “Because (the buildings) have to work together in the future.”

Currently the plan is to break the construction into three phases, with the Ephrata equipment shop first, followed by the Moses Lake equipment shop, then the new headquarters.

“We’re putting together a team of our (staff) to start looking at property availability,” he said. “We hope that by the end of this year we can have a better picture of both the location and the budget.”

The committee that wrote the facilities plan recommended combining the PUD headquarters and the Ephrata equipment shop at one location, and neither of the existing locations would be suitable. The Moses Lake equipment shop – the PUD calls them service centers – would be moved to a new location.

The committee recommended keeping service centers in Royal City, Wanapum, Quincy and Coulee City. The customer service offices in Quincy, Moses Lake, Royal City and Ephrata would stay open, although they might be relocated. The committee also recommended closing the Grand Coulee service center and customer service office, but finding an alternative to keep a customer service office in Grand Coulee.

Fleisher said the study committee determined it would be most cost-effective to replace the three facilities, rather than remodel them.

“They’re all aging facilities; quite a bit of infrastructure inside the buildings is now very old, in some cases,” he said.

In addition, any future growth is constrained by what’s around the existing locations, he said.

The facilities plan would establish three regional service centers for the county, the new ones in Ephrata and Moses Lake, and a third one in the Quincy-George area. Fleisher said the planners came to some general conclusions.

“We did do some fairly good transportation planning as far as travel distances and roads, and that piece of it. We believe that in the Moses Lake area, we need something probably around the I-90 area. From our transportation studies that worked out best,” he said.

The Ephrata service center currently is located at the intersection of Nat Washington Way and A Street Southeast, a block off Ephrata’s main street. Fleisher said the study determined that wouldn’t be a good location for a new headquarters-service center combination.

“We probably need to be on what we refer to as the south side of Ephrata,” he said.

That could be an area along Dodson Road or somewhere along Highway 28, he said, but exactly where will be one of the things determined in the next phase of the project.

“We refer to this scenario of two primary service centers as the regional scenario, because we looked at the region and how we could best serve that. We got into the details of looking at roads and travel times and things like that, the best we could for now. To kind of give a general area,” he said.

Additional information is needed before a final plan is determined, Fleisher said.

“We kind of have a general picture about locations, we have about the size we think we’re going to need,” he said. “Our goal is that by the end of this year we know pretty close to what and where we’re going to go.”

Cheryl Schweizer may be reached via email at cschweizer@columbiabasinherald.com.