KUGLER TWP- The new St. Louis County maintenance facility garage in Kugler Township looks huge from the outside, but the inside seems even larger and it showcases the county’s commitment to keeping the 182 miles of county roads in the Tower/Embarrass district safe for travel year-round.
At an open house on Aug. 26, many community members took time to tour the facility, ask questions, and talk with the county employees who take care of roads in all weather conditions.
Chad Skelton, fleet and property manager for the county, was on hand to talk about the new facility, state-of-the-art road equipment, and a commitment to cut costs and be mindful of the environmental impacts of their work, especially the use of road salt.
The county has mostly switched to using a brine solution to prevent icing on roads.
“We are trying to reduce our use of salt as much as possible,” said Skelton. “We are spending two million dollars a year on salt.” He noted that the brine solution uses less salt than direct application of salt granules and starts reducing ice of roadways immediately, and can be effective at a wider range of cold temperatures.
The brine solution is created at a county facility in Ely, and the new Kugler garage can store enough to last through about three major snow events.
The brand new 425 horse-power snowplow on display, one of two recently purchased by the county, has a two-way plow, heated headlight lenses, three video cameras with displays in the cab, and also high-tech add-ons which allow the driver to see the real time temperature of both the air and the blacktop surface. Friction sensors will be added to the plow blade cutting edge, which will tell the driver how slippery the roadway is. The truck even tracks how many miles are on the plow’s cutting blade, so they can be replaced when needed.
“They can adjust their spread rate in real time,” Skelton said.
There is also onboard data analysis, which adjusts the application of the brine solution based on data from previous snow events.
The new truck is actually a protoype and took two years to build, Skelton said. It can hold enough brine and granular material to last a full shift, which means less time wasted getting refilled at the garage. In addition, the new garage is large enough to fit all the plow trucks inside, without having to remove the plow itself, which was not the case at the previous facilities in Tower and Embarrass. This will give maintenance staff an additional two hours a day on the road, if needed.
The new facility will also have a truck wash installed sometime in the next year, so trucks can get washed each time they reenter the garage.
“So, we won’t be parking dirty trucks inside,” Skelton said.
The new truck cost about $330,000 and Skelton said it is one of the most tech-savvy plow trucks anywhere in the nation. Skelton expects the truck to last at least 12 years. He said the county buys about 10 new plow trucks a year.
“We have about 3,000 miles of roads to plow,” said public works director Jim Foldesi, “and 116 plow routes.”
The county has also upgraded other dump trucks that have removable bodies, so they can be used for multiple types of road needs. This new county facility will house eight dump trucks and two graders, enough to cover the seven plow routes. Nine employees are based out of the building, which covers 299 square miles with 88 miles of gravel roads and 94 miles of paved roads.
This is one of three new buildings recently constructed at a cost of $34 million. Each new facility includes a main building, storage buildings, salt/sand domes, brine storage system, fuel system, truck wash and paved driving and laydown areas that all support efficient cost-effective operations. The buildings in Kugler, Culver, and Makinen were constructed with energy efficiency, ease of maintenance, and longevity in mind. They replace five smaller garages in Tower, Embarrass, Brookston, Brimson and the Town of White that had outlived their usefulness due to age, lack of space, or both.