After two years of planning and construction, the new main Porter County Highway Garage is now open under budget and with technologies allowing for better maintenance of the county’s 800 miles of roads.
Located at 1955 State Road 2 in Valparaiso, the new garage, cold storage facility, and salt dome occupy the same 10 acres as before, but the facilities are a world away from the cramped and crumbling facilities they replace, Highway Superintendent Jim Polarek said on a tour Friday morning.
The facilities include administrative offices, map room, conference room, mechanical room, training/break room, garage, sign shop, wash bay, cold storage, salt dome, and locker room.
“If we get stranded here in a snow storm or somebody falls in a mud puddle, we can get cleaned up,” Polarek said of his and hers locker rooms the department has never had before.
The most prominent feature of the 48,000-square-foot main building and 7,000-square-foot cold storage garage is the ability to properly care for expensive equipment that often had to be kept outside in the past.
“Before we could get all the trucks inside if we put them nose to tail, but we couldn’t put the plows on,” Polarek said of the winter season that calls for the maintenance of over 200 neighborhoods.
In the past when a storm was on the way, staff would have to come in at 3 a.m. and spend an hour hustling trucks around to get the plows installed. Considering that each plow and truck combo costs around $350,000, county officials are happy not to have to park them outside anymore.
And when crews come back from salting roads, they can now clean off their equipment after pulling through 14-foot overhead doors into a soaring wash bay. Specialized features allow for washing the trucks from above and below to keep protect the county’s assets from corrosion.
When asked by Board of Commissioners Vice President Barb Regnitz, R-Center, for his favorite part of the new facilities, Polarek replied, “just the fact that our mechanics can be under one roof.” The maintenance bay, which is at least three times the size of the old one, may make it easier for the county to attract and retain mechanics, something it’s struggled with in the past.
There are now 10 bays as opposed to three before.
“I think there were four doors, but the one you couldn’t get in because it had stuff piled in,” Polarek said.
A jib crane can lift five tons, while a school bus yellow Craneworks overhead crane can hoist 10 tons for the lifting of beds off trucks and other tasks. That allows for mechanics to do more repairs in-house.
“You have everything in this building laid out at your hands,” gushed Porter County Board of Commissioners President Ed Morales, R-South. “This is a beautiful shop, from the exhaust to everything,” he added, referring to two large blue exhaust hoses suspended from the ceiling.
Two sets of portable truck lifts can handle lighter jobs. “Anywhere you can park a truck you can wheel them in,” Polarek said. In the old garage “everything was with floor jacks and rolling underneath them. Now that we have more room we can actually tear an engine apart.”
The new dome holds 2,000 tons of salt compared to the old dome that held 600 tons. Polarek was happy to see it go. “I made the first hole in the roof in the old salt dome,” he recalled. “They had the excavator here and I said, ‘I get the first whack at it.’”
All these improvements came in below the $18 million budget. Construction costs totaled $12.9 million, while soft costs for equipment and professional fees were $3.6 million bringing the total to $16.5 million. That left money for extra equipment such as an ultrasonic cleaner to wash exhaust filters.
“We went through the budget every month,” said Regnitz. “Every month for two years we didn’t miss it,” agreed Scott Cherry of The Skillman Corporation which oversaw the project. “Because of Jim’s work we were able to shave off a million and we gave that to the jail,” he added of cost-saving measures Polarek’s staff undertook such as demolishing the old facility.
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Referred to as Bond 1, the bond taken out by the county in 2023 financed the garage as well as a new roof for the Porter County Jail. Bond 2 taken out a year later is paying for the remainder of the jail renovation, which is slated for completion by the end of the year, and renovations to other county facilities such as the Juvenile Detention Center.
Regnitz said the county’s upgraded credit rating means the two bonds together are now costing taxpayers less than what Bond 1 was originally costing alone before the rating change.
Shelley Jones is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.