The City of Hastings lost a seasonal storage building when the former Arrow Building Center (ABC) building at the corner of Bailey Street and 4th Street East was sold to a developer. The property was vacated by ABC and ultimately ended up owned by HEDRA. The building has been in use by the city to seasonally store equipment since 2005. With the property sold, the city had to vacate so it can be developed.

The loss of the ABC space forced the city to find an alternative space to store the equipment. The decision was made to build the new cold storage facility on the public works property, but they needed storage space in the interim.

That forced the city to find alternate storage while the new cold storage facility was built. They found a month-to-month lease for a facility in the Industrial Park and moved items around to other city facilities as needed while the project got started in June.

The public works department had plenty of space at the 1225 Progress Drive property and a 13,000 square foot facility was built. The inside is just under 11,000 square feet and the outside has covered, lit storage with security. The project was initially expected to be over $2.5 million to build until Cody Mathesen stepped in, according to Interim Public Works Director Ryan Stempski.

“He took this project to heart,” said Stempski. “He kind of wrestled me to say ‘No, I can help out here’ even though he didn't have time to do it in his other duties. But he took on this additional commitment and said ‘No, we can get it done in house and go through a traditional design bid build process.’ By doing that, in my calculations from early on to our total final project cost which I'll get into later, we saved the city about a million dollars on this building.”

The building has aesthetics similar to the other buildings on the property and it will provide much needed additional secure storage. There is a mezzanine level that can store about 600 square feet of lighter goods elevated off the ground. The utility room stores the chemicals for the fire suppression system in the only heated part of the building. The facility is labelled as cold storage because it currently does not have any kind of heating capabilities other than the small utility room. There is also no bathroom, but there is plumbing to install one in the future if needed.

The total cost of the project was $1.6 million.