County commissioners on Wednesday authorized Dawson to advertise for proposals from design/build firms for the county engineer’s garage complex building upgrades, with the proposals to be opened at the engineer’s office on Sept. 17.

Construction of the new storage garage, where all the trucks will be parked, is now complete, but awaiting a state inspection before the building can be occupied. The new garage, which includes eight bays with doors on each side, replaces an old building which dated back to the Depression era and was falling down. The new garage is wide open and inside includes a restroom.

Now the plan is to update other buildings in the complex, such as the building next to the new structure where vehicle repairs are done and where there’s an office and parts storage.

“We’re going to put new siding on it,” Dawson said during a recent tour of the engineer’s buildings and grounds.

He would like to get the buildings all one color — white — instead of the tan color the repair shop building is now. The new garage is white with green trim.

Plans also call for some work on the roof on the brick building where the engineers have their offices, which is next to the repair shop, and moving the paint shop in the basement to the building the county purchased across the street on South Market Street in Lisbon. The building previously housed a machine shop and now will become the location for the engineer’s paint shop.

Dawson said that’s a bigger space for the paint shop.

Since taking office back in the late 1960s, Dawson has been gradually making improvements to the department structures. He shared that the brick office where the design engineers do their work was previously the county garage before his time and before that was a grist mill.

Dawson’s office was located on the first floor of the county courthouse where half of the commissioners office is now. The current office, which also houses the tax map office, on the corner of South Market Street and Maple Street, was built on land purchased from the Dickey family, along with the railroad station across the street which Dawson updated.

Now the focus is on the garage complex, with the new building and the planned updates. The engineer’s office employs 50 workers, with a staff that includes seven professional engineers, two graduate engineers and three surveyors. Those numbers include Dawson.

A project that’s been talked about for many, many years to expand U.S. Route 30 into a four-lane to hook up with the four-lane in Canton remains a goal Dawson would like to see happen, with efforts now being made to get a line item in the federal budget to finally finish the four-lane project.

In other business for the engineer, the commissioners awarded the contract for the Skyview Acres Cured in Place Pipe (CIPP) Project in Yellow Creek Township to Insituform Technologies LLC for $109,995. Other bidders were Insight Pipe Contracting LLC for $115,968 and United Survey Inc. for $125,072.

County Chief Deputy Sanitary Engineer Troy Graft said last week that the project funding is coming from a $140,000 Ohio Public Works Commission grant, along with a local share that’s required.

He explained the project is being required by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency to seal up water intrusions into the collection system for the small water treatment plant serving the Skyview Acres residential subdivision. He said the collection system is old and a lot of ground water is running into the vitrified clay pipe.

The project will use a process of placing a pipe within the old pipe from manhole-to-manhole, which he described as a cloth sock which expands with hot water and activates a resin which then seals the old pipe.

mgreier@mojonews.com