The preliminary report about the feasibility study of the Town of Wake Forest’s Operations Center on Friendship Chapel Road says it is too small, not compatible with the Holding Village subdivision about to grow around it and has poor access to its service area.
And Matt Humienny, an architect with IBI Group of North Carolina, part of a team for the study that includes Stewart Engineering, said the cost to build a center that will serve the town’s needs for 30 years or more will cost substantially more than the $8 million currently in the capital improvement plan, as much as $20 million not counting the cost of 22 to 32 acres of land.
His presentation with a PowerPoint was part of the morning agenda for the Wake Forest Town Board’s summer retreat held Friday at the Renaissance Centre.
Located on 15 acres, some of them unusable because of flood-prone soils, the operations center was built in 1993 and now has seven buildings or structures. Wake Forest Power with all its equipment and crews and the town’s street and sanitation operations are housed at the center as well as the warehouse and the purchasing section of the finance department.
Friendship Chapel is currently a dead-end road, and all vehicles have to cross the CSX railroad tracks to reach South Main Street. That railroad crossing will be closed when the Southeast High Speed Rail project is built. Holding Village developers propose to build a subdivision-style network of streets that will connect to South Franklin Street and the N.C. 98 Bypass, where the intersection in the future will be a superstreet with right turns only on to the bypass.
All of that makes the present site unsuitable for the large trucks and pieces of equipment the department, especially Wake Forest Power, uses. On site, the feasibility team found, there is not enough room to maneuver some of the vehicles safely, there is not enough staff parking, along with a lack of a large meeting space. The garage is unsuitable for modern fleets and there is a lack of shelter for some of the equipment, leading to deterioration from the weather. And there is a 50-foot drop from one part of the center to the other.
Although the study is not complete, Humienny said the recommendation is to purchase up to 32 relatively flat land with multiple access points and multiple routes to the rest of the town, away from the railroad with a signalized intersection onto a thoroughfare. There should be space for about 115 staff members, with shelter for all vehicles and equipment.
The study suggests the current center could be sold or repurposed for another town department such as the police or parks and recreation. Another suggestion is to split public works between two sites.
Humienny and other team members have been interviewing the 65 employees at the center, and he said they were pleased by the sensible suggestions the employees made for the new center, including a bill-paying kiosk, a public drop-off recycling center, a wellness center for employees, an emergency command center for disasters, a public community room and public visibility for the main building.
Chad Sary, the former assistant director in the Wake Forest Planning Department, is the land planner on the Stewart Engineering team.
One of the questions Friday was why the center was built on such an unsuitable site, and Planning Director Chip Russell did not have an answer. For many years the electric, street and garbage collection men and equipment were housed in a metal shed that stood behind the original town hall on Brooks Street. That was torn down in the 1980s and the public works operations, not yet a department, was relocated to an old shed with a small office on the former Holding dairy farm which was also on Friendship Chapel Road, though then it was a dirt road.
