County highway dept. building project moving forward

The Clark County Highway Department has made plans to expand its facilities, including a new maintenance shop and administration office in Loyal. A bid opening for that project is scheduled for January 31 at 8:30 a.m. at the highway department office, 801 Clay St., Neillsville. Construction is planned to start this spring.

The new Loyal building is part of an $8 million project the county board approved in October 2021, which also includes upgrading county highway department facilities in Neillsville and Owen. However, now the overall price tag is expected to be higher as material costs continue to rise. When the county board first approved the project, the new Loyal building was estimated to cost $3 million. Now it is estimated to cost around $4.8 million.

The first phase of the project is complete, which included an updated fuel island and salt shed in Neillsville. That was finished in December. The project also includes adding a truck storage shed and wash bay in Owen, with those two items scheduled for 2024.

The highway department’s current brick buildings, such as the garage in Loyal, were built between 1938 and 1942. The Neillsville one was built in the 1960s. County Highway Commissioner Brian Duell felt this project was necessary to accommodate the larger trucks of today.

“We wanted to give us more room for our trucks. In the 60s and 80s, they had much smaller trucks than today and now we’re running out of room to get the trucks inside our building,” said Duell.

The idea of upgrading the county highway department facilities is not new to the last few years. In the 1990s, the county decided to purchase 40 acres of land on Highway 98 between Loyal and Greenwood for the highway department to use. Duell said the county board had between $3 million and $5 million set aside, but ended up voting against the proposal to build a shop there. The county sold the land and used the money elsewhere.

“So it’s been going on since the 90s. And there was another time the county talked about it between then and now,” said Duell. “The reason we started looking at Loyal is because we have a county that’s very north and south. It’s difficult to have just one facility because it makes our response time a lot longer. For example, going from Neillsville to Dorchester is a long haul. If you look the four corners of our county, we have Thorp, Dorchester, Hatfield and Sherwood, so that’s a large distance we’re covering. So we can’t just have one facility, but we are trying to centralize things.”

“We originally thought about putting additional truck storage and administration in Neillsville, and spent a year planning, but everything came back to being more centrally located. With having our main facility in Loyal, that puts us 20 minutes away from Owen and 20 minutes away from Neillsville, versus hauling our equipment that needs to be fixed from Owen all the way to Neillsville.”

Part of the reason the county went ahead with borrowing the $8 million in 2021 was that interest rates were low. The county was able to get a a 2.95 percent interest rate on a 10-year loan from Citizens State Bank of Loyal. Also in that year, the highway department hired a firm and had a study done on building needs, space needs and a feasible budget.

Last year, the county hired an architectural firm, Excel Engineering out of Fond du Lac, to design the Loyal and Owen buildings. Boson Company of Marshfield is serving as the construction management company. Ratsch Engineering of Neillsville worked on the Neillsville projects.

The Neillsville projects cost about $325,000. Current cost estimates for the rest of the projects are: the Loyal facility, $4.8 million; Owen facility, $800,000; engineering, architecture and construction management fees, $992,000; and a 10-percent contingency of $750,000.

There will be an alternate bid for cold storage buildings in Loyal and Owen.

“That’s not our top priority. Our original plan was to have cold storage buildings, but now they’re lower on the priority list. It’s a hope but it probably won’t happen,” said Duell.

He also commented on the overall cost. “If you look at other counties that have built all new facilities from the ground up, like Eau Claire County and Pepin County, you’re looking at two to three times our price. So it’s a big project for Clark County, but when you look at new highway facilities across the state, it’s a low number. We have other infrastructure that needed to be improved throughout the county, like at Bruce Mound, the fairgrounds and the health care center. The county had a list of needs, so we (at the highway department) had to wait our turn for our need,” he said.

The highway department upgrades are part of an overall plan to reorganize department resources for the greatest benefit.

“Over time, we want to work on efficiencies and reduce our equipment — the number of spare trucks we have on hand,” said Duell.

All of the site work at Loyal has been completed. The county also worked with the City of Loyal to have the city abandon the alley that goes through highway department property, and to be allowed to use Pope Street.

“We worked with the city on using Pope Street for public or employee access, not truck access. It’s built into the plan. We probably won’t do that right away because we want to wait until the building is there and see what the drainage is like and the traffic flow. But we wanted to have that option,” said Duell.

Back in October 2021, the county board voted 26-2 to approve the $8 million loan for the highway department project. If the county needs to borrow more money for the project, including to add on things like the cold storage buildings, that will require a separate vote.