GRANGER — Officials say they soon may announce the site of the county’s new Granger highway garage, and it won’t be at the corner of Anderson and Beech roads that neighbors had so hotly opposed last spring.

Instead, St. Joseph County Commissioner Carl Baxmeyer said the county is working through a purchase agreement with the private seller of another site. He stopped short of publicly saying where it is because the deal isn’t inked yet.

Meanwhile, interest in building a new county park at the Anderson-Beech site remains alive on all fronts, but officials say they’ll need to work through financing for the garage first.

And, at the south end of the county, the county is now dealing with a badly burned highway garage thanks to a fire Dec. 22 at its Woodland site that destroyed three dump trucks and damaged several other dump trucks and pickups, County Engineer Sky Medors said. It appears that the building may be totaled, but that hasn’t yet been confirmed, he said, as an investigator from the county’s insurance company works on the case. An electrical cause is suspected.

For this winter’s snow plowing and salting operations, Medors said, the county will store some trucks in other buildings at the Woodland site — which sits on New Road by the Bremen Highway — while moving other vehicles to other county garages.

Pivoting from Anderson Road

County officials decided against the seven-acre parcel at Anderson and Beech for a garage last summer, particularly after a packed meeting April 27 at Granger Missionary Church where officials explained the safety precautions they’d take but still heard the anger of local residents.

May 15, 2023: St. Joseph County officials hold off on Anderson garage to consider options

“Our constituents spoke up; we have to listen,” county council member Dan Schaetzle, whose district includes Granger, said recently of the decision to turn away from the Anderson site.

“It really made me better as a councilman,” Schaetzle said. “I had to stand in front of an angry crowd and explain what we were doing. It helped me to quickly get in tune with constituents rather than work from ideology.”

Neighbors were relieved. And the controversy, which had spurred a petition with more than 1,200 signatures, went quiet, said John Sill, who’d started raising concerns in the first place. He lives across the road from the site and is retired after 31 years of running an environmental testing and consulting firm.

Neighbors had opposed that site chiefly out of concerns that any potential spill of fuel or salt could leach into groundwater that’s just six to seven feet below the surface. Sill said these shallow conditions continue east to the Elkhart County border, but it generally gets better going west. He said the groundwater is tucked deeper below the surface heading to the west because the ground’s elevation gradually slopes upward, rising about 20 feet in more than a mile.

Neighbors had also raised concerns about increased truck traffic.

Schaetzle and Baxmeyer still feel that the county was planning for more-than-adequate measures to mitigate any risk of contamination. Baxmeyer said the county made designs that are beyond state environmental requirements for above-ground fuel tanks and road-salt containment, using double-walled tanks, an automatic shut-off valve, an oil-water separator underground and a monitoring system.

The potential new garage site, Schaetzle said, is already zoned industrial and is near other light industrial properties. When asked if it’s near a neighborhood, he said it doesn’t directly face the front of anyone’s home.

It would replace the garage on Cleveland Road near the Indiana Toll Road, built in 1975, that’s in need of repair and that would be demolished once a new garage is built.

Prospect for a new park

While several neighbors opposed an Anderson garage, they wanted the potential park.

The Anderson-Beech site was an opportunity because it’s part of 115 acres that the county already owns. More precisely, the St. Joseph County Parks has owned it since 1999. It has leased much of it out to farmers while waiting for county funding to actually build a new park.

Sept. 22, 2022: New Granger county park could emerge from highway garage deal

The garage idea gave the first hope for funding.

Last year, county officials budgeted $2.7 million of federal American Rescue Plan money for a new county garage at Anderson and Beech roads ($1 million) and for various park projects and events ($1.7 million). County Parks Executive Director Steve Slauson said none of that particular slice of pandemic relief money has been spent on parks so far.

A park bond has been one possible source of funding for the park, which has been estimated at about $4 million to build. But Slauson notes that county officials don’t want to seek any steps that would cause residents’ property taxes to rise.

Baxmeyer and Schaetzle said they’d still like to see the park become reality, too.

“The garage has to be the first domino to fall,” Schaetzle said.

Then, once they know how much that will cost, he said, officials could look at how to pay for the cost of a new park.

South Bend Tribune reporter Joseph Dits can be reached at 574-235-6158 or jdits@sbtinfo.com.

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: St. Joseph County nears deal for Granger highway garage Anderson Road