City staff will ask council to approve a plan to renovate the former Magnotta Wines building at 1300 Bishop St. N. next week at an estimated cost of $115,000.
Magnotta closed its Cambridge location in January, seven years after the city purchased the property with the intention of expanding its Bishop Street Operations Centre next door.
The building offers 13,000 square feet of space that can support crews, office staff, some equipment and supplies with moderate short term efforts needed to address their needs.
The move comes at a time when staff and equipment has begun to put significant pressure on the existing operations centre at 1100 Bishop St. N., says a report headed to council July 9.
The Hamilton Street workshop, next to the Preston Aud, was also decommissioned and demolished last year.
The move to purchase the Magnotta Wines building followed a recommendation in a master plan developed in 2008 that identified the need for more space to support the city's growing operations workforce.
That plan estimated baseline renovations to the building would cost about $173,000 plus $401,000 to renovate the building to support an expanding workforce. The annual operating impact was estimated at $202,000.
Immediate renovations to the facility will come in significantly less than projected.
They include $90,000 worth of updates to the washrooms, the addition of a change room with lockers, a common lunch area with kitchenette as well as some open office spaces with cubicles, shared workstations for lead hands, and offices for a supervisor and manager.
Running a fibre optic cable to the building will cost an estimated $25,000.
The project will enable the re-location of 15 staff, including the recently expanded forestry crews and technical staff as well as a manager and supervisor.
It will also allow the current operations centre to better accommodate staff who were previously on Hamilton Street, wastwater crews, stormwater management staff, asset management staff, IT staff and other seasonal staff.
Further capital investments will be needed for renovations down the road at 1300 Bishop.
The second phase of the project would add more space to accommodate the horticulture and landscape crews that have outgrown space in Riverside Park.
In the third phases of the project, more space would be created to accommodate the Cambridge Ambassador Team.
And in the fourth and final phase, a second floor renovation would relocate parks supervisors and a sustainability planner from the Dickson Arena office space.
