Public Works Yard Updates (Nanaimo Operations Centre)

Visit our Get Involved page to learn more about this project

The City of Nanaimo is completing major updates to the Public Works Yard. Nanaimo’s Public Works department provides the basic services that residents use each day throughout our community. The people that are providing these services to you are working out of buildings which are no longer functional and were never intended to still be in use today.

The mission statement of this project is to address the long-standing and increasingly unsustainable health, safety, environmental, and operational shortcomings of the site in a fiscally responsible manner.

To accomplish this, we will replace the two most significant buildings at the Public Works Yard; the Fleet Maintenance and Crew & Administration buildings. Over 229 people will be working out of these buildings on day one. Those people are responsible for bringing you clean water, collecting your garbage and recycling, ensuring our roads are safe, building and caring for our City’s beautiful parks, and taking care of our community and social centres.

The Fleet Maintenance building is where mechanics maintain the City’s fleet of vehicles. Ranging from garbage trucks to electric pickups, Zambonis, to dump trucks, and fire trucks to sedans, this fleet of vehicles is part of what helps to keep Nanaimo moving. The Crew and Administration building has crew workspaces, changerooms, offices, and an emergency operations centre.

These buildings will be simple construction, nothing fancy, but 'post-disaster' rated and created with safety and functionality at the forefront. That means they will be there and ready to keep servicing our community when we need it most.

As part of this update, Parks Operations and Facility crews will be relocating from the Parks Operations Yard on Prideaux Street, the Nanaimo Lakes Road Parks Satellite Yard, and the Bowen Park Social Centre. This will bring the majority of the City’s operational staff together to the updated buildings to collaboratively deliver the essential services our community requires.

To learn more about this project visit our Get Involved Nanaimo site. You can also review more technical information and Council reports below. Some of these reports and technical plans are based on older configurations of the plans to update the Yard, but they provide a history of this project and how it has developed over the last five years.

Background

Our current Public Works and Parks yards are well past their usable lifespan, and no longer suitable to serve our growing community. The original Public Works buildings were constructed in the 1960's and then evolved as the City population grew from less than 45,000 in 1980. The City of Nanaimo is now 100,000 people strong and growing.

The original Public Works buildings were constructed in the 1960’s and then evolved as the City population grew from less than 45,000 in 1980 to over 100,000 in 2021. Much of the additional space was added using modular temporary facilities, not intended for permanent use. 

Public Works Yard 1960's:

Approximate Community Population 30,000
Approximate City Population 14,135

Public Works Yard 2024:

Approximate Community Population 107,000

The Public Works facilities are well beyond their useful life. They have exceeded staff capacity and considerable efforts have been made to accommodate increasing needs by converting unsuitable spaces or adding additional trailer units to create room. The overall result is a facility that struggles or fails to meet existing operational needs, environmental regulations, as well as building code or accessibility and gender equity considerations.

With the population of Nanaimo expected to be in the range of 126,000-141,000 in 25 years, there will continue to be a substantial increase in the demand for services and the people that deliver those services will need adequate facilities to complete their jobs.

Contact Information

By email: EngineeringInfo@nanaimo.ca
By mail: City of Nanaimo, Engineering Department, 455 Wallace Street, Nanaimo BC, V9R 5J6
By phone: 250-754-4251, Ext 4230