Foley’s new $17M public works campus opens to support city growth

Foley and Baldwin County officials cut the ribbon Monday, July 27, on its new Public Works Campus at North Poplar Street and East Section Avenue, giving the fast-growing city room to keep pace with itself for decades to come.

At $17 million, the new campus is a big investment, and city leaders say it’s designed to serve Foley for the next 30 to 40 years, giving the city’s infrastructure crews the space and resilience to grow right alongside it.

Why Foley needed a new public works facility

The old facility opened back in 1991, when Foley was home to about 7,300 residents, the city said.

Fast forward to today, and the city serves more than 30,000 people with a public works staff that has grown from 25 employees to more than 100 and a municipal fleet that has expanded from 142 vehicles to over 520, Mayor Ralph Hellmich said at the dedication.

What’s inside the new Foley public works campus

The five-building, 14-acre campus brings several departments together under one roof, including:

• Public Works
• Sanitation
• Street
• Engineering

The centerpiece is a 16,000-square-foot fleet maintenance garage that services everything from garbage trucks to police cruisers and fire vehicles — making the new campus the pit stop for all of Foley’s municipal vehicles.

Crews from the new campus handle the unglamorous-but-essential stuff that keeps the city moving: more than 40 miles of sidewalks, expanded streets and drainage systems, plus dedicated tree-trimming and road-building crews added in recent years to keep up with growth.

How the campus is built to survive hurricane season

Living on the Gulf Coast means building for the storms, and this campus has a strong hurricane defense. Every building is constructed to withstand winds of up to 160 miles per hour, so crews can shelter safely on-site and get back to cleanup fast once the weather clears.

Two natural gas generators keep the lights on during outages, and fuel storage capacity has jumped from about a week’s supply to three or four weeks.

What it means for trash pickup and recycling in Foley

For residents, it’s mostly business as usual, just with more muscle behind it. Sanitation crews collect residential garbage from roughly 23,000 homes each week using five trucks running four-day routes, and the city’s curbside recycling program, now used by about 40% of Foley households, continues to grow.