Golden Valley Moving Forward with New Public Works Location
Golden Valley city leaders are moving ahead with a multi-step and multi-year plan to remake the city’s core public facilities with the purchase of a tract of land on which the city hopes to build its new public works facility.
“The public works facility is currently four large buildings on our downtown campus,” said City of Golden Valley Director of Community and Economic Development Emily Goellner. “We have a lot of public works vehicles maneuvering in and out of this facility on a daily basis and it’s not always creating the safest environment or really a cohesive public works facility environment that’s needed for efficiency.”
Goellner said city council gave approval for the city to begin the acquisition of 6100 Olson Memorial Highway, near the intersection with Douglas Drive, for the new public works facility.
“They’ll be able to serve the whole community in a more campus-like setting where all of their needs are met there and they’re not moving from site to site around town,” she said. “When that happens, we’ll be able to demolish the existing public works buildings to make room for our new facilities and our new public space, so we’re very excited about that acquisition.”
The potential move of the Golden Valley Public Works facility to a parcel on Highway 55 will allow for reconstruction and refiguring of the city’s police and fire departments on the civic center campus.
That will involve designing new police and fire stations, which currently share a decades-old building across from city hall.
“We also want to research where we can have significant park-like space for our community here on this space,” said Goellner. “A lot of people currently gather under the water tower here today for various festivals and we want to make sure that still exists in our new master plan. So, the next step in the process is to hire a consultant firm, a design firm, to work on a master plan for us. And, when that master plan is eventually adopted by our city council, that’s the plan we will build from.”
Goellner expects the design of a master plan for the new civic center to take about a year. The majority of the funding for this comes from the city’s sales tax increase first approved by voters in 2023. Goellner said the income from that tax has already topped $100 million and will continue to grow.
“It’s an incredible amount of work that we are very excited to do. It’s the kind of work that leaves a legacy for coming generations, so we take this work very seriously and we try to incorporate it into our daily life at our organization because it’s very important and very special work that not everyone who works for a city gets to work on,” said Goellner. “Now we get to do all of these things in the same five-year span but I think that gives our team motivation to keep figuring out how these new facilities keep working for the next 75 years.”
