Urban Forestry Department to leave crumbling building
A good description of where the Urban Forestry Department is located might be that it is the ugly, green building next to city hall, and that’s being kind.
While the part most people see when they walk in the front door on Chancery Street seems presentable, it gets even uglier once deeper inside.
A cracked foundation – some patched, some not – with mud reportedly seeping through the cracks when it rains, undrinkable water and inches of mud turned into dirt in the “basement” that can’t store much of anything of value would seem to make it an undesirable spot for anyone to work in.
That is about to change after the department got the nod to move into the city’s old transfer station located on Sunset Point. The transfer station – a neat metal building with office space, a potential conference room, bathrooms, showers and three large equipment bays – had been used in the city’s garbage operations. It is not being used much anymore after officials took their garbage business elsewhere last fall.
“The building is pretty old,” urban forester Nick Kuhn said of the place he has called home for the past four years, noting the Public Works Department had moved out of the Chancery Street building more than a decade before the Urban Forestry Department was ever created.
“But when I started here, at least it was something to use. But the cracks in the foundation of the building are getting bigger and there’s muddy water coming out of the cracks when it rains, so that’s not a good thing,” he added, noting there was no drinking water due to a sulfur smell.
Workers in the building agreed and pointed out numerous cracks in the foundation as well as old wiring, a corner of the building that had been hit by a truck and patched over and a buckled wooden floor.
Since the city started hauling its garbage somewhere else several months ago, City Administrator Herb Llewellyn said the city’s Public Works Department runs a small route on weekends for a few commercial customers and that is the major extent of use at the transfer station.
“What they normally do on Saturday is bring the truck in full and park it at the transfer station, so that’s essentially all they use it for. They still use the recycling part of it. Cardboard goes out there and gets compacted and they’re still using that end of it, but the compactor and hauling and loading garbage, we don’t do that anymore.”
That development led to Kuhn requesting the move, which was formally approved a few weeks ago.
Kuhn said the department’s phone number – 474-TREE – is expected to stay the same. And after some irrigation lines are put in, the department is expected to be fully operational next week.
It is undecided what will become of the old building.
“Our recommendation to the committee was to actually crush it, destroy it,” Kuhn added of the place he has occupied for the past four years. “If the city was to sell the property, we didn’t want to sell that building to somebody else. We said, ‘It’s not safe.’ That was one recommendation.”
Another idea was to use it as a central point of operations for the Main Street McMinnville construction project, but nothing has been determined at this point, Llewellyn added.