A small sign with big plans sits at the intersection of Airport and Stage Gulch roads in northwest Pendleton.
Replete with factories and manufacturing plants, the sign depicts the western part of the Airport Industrial Park the way Pendleton city officials have long envisioned it.
The intersection plays a pivotal role in Pendleton’s plans to turn the farmland and empty fields into an industrial hub. But before it can change above ground, a lot must change below.
Steve Chrisman, Pendleton airport manager and economic development director, has called it the million dollar mile. It’s a stretch of proposed water and sewer lines from the airport’s current industrial park to an area near the Airport-Stage Gulch that would carry a seven-figure price tag.
Chrisman said conventional wisdom would have the industrial park grow incrementally to the west, the city building out the corresponding utilities as needed.
But much of the land between the airport and intersection is either too uneven to develop or can’t be purchased because it’s under the jurisdiction of the Federal Aviation Administration.
Chrisman said that makes a long, do-it-all-at-once utility line necessary.
The city used a 4-cent gas tax and federal grant money to extend Airport Road to the Barnhart Road exit on Interstate 84 in 2009. They hoped that increased accessibility would bring manufacturers and other industrial companies to the airport. The 40-acre plot the city bought in 2011 for future industrial development has mostly sat vacant, with little access to utilities until recently.
Spurred by a Vancouver, Washington company interested in building a data center in the area, the city built a $300,000 sewer line extension to Stage Gulch Road, saving money by having city workers install the line themselves instead of hiring a contractor.
But the city’s plan to connect the intersection to the rest of its utility system is much more ambitious than that.
The city’s water master plan has Pendleton building an interim westward line extension, a pond and a pump station within the next five years at an estimated cost of $2.8 million.
Public Works Director Bob Patterson said the water would mostly be needed for fire suppression purposes, enough to supply a sustained rate of 2,000 gallons per minute for four hours.
The master plan also calls for $3.5 million in water projects on the east side of the airport, to supply water to a planned industrial park for unmanned aerial system companies. And the plan pegs the cost of gravity mains, lift stations and force mains at $7.3 million in the next five years, although Patterson said that figure would be lowered with the westward sewer line extension already completed.
To pay for the substantial cost of expanding its utility system at the airport and cover maintenance costs across Pendleton, the city wants to leverage recent water and sewer rate hikes to pay for a loan.
Patterson said he has already sent in an application for a sewer loan and is working on the application for a water loan that’s due in September.
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