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How To Handle A Public Works Crisis With Nick Egger
This week we are joined by Nick Egger, Public Works Director for the City of Rosemount, MN. Nick steps back to his time with the City of Hastings, MN and the management of a water contamination event in 2018. Nick talks about how they discovered the contamination, lessons learned about communication, and working with the state Department of Health. We also talk about how the water was treated initially and long term.
We then shift gears to his time at the City of Rosemount where he now gets to help manage the construction of a new Public Works and Police facility and Campus.
Finally, we talk about Nick's time as the President of the Minnesota Chapter of the APWA and how important professional societies are to our industry.
Join us for a fun conversation with a proven leader in the Public Works industry.
Show Notes:
Hastings Water Contamination Event:
News Report:
https://www.kare11.com/article/news/city-of-hastings-confirms-ecoli-in-parts-of-water-system/89-597279358
Star Tribune Article:
https://www.startribune.com/hastings-decides-to-permanently-chlorinate-city-s-water-supply-after-e-coli-contamination-last-fall/510947952/
Minnesota Drinking Water Supply Report
https://www.health.state.mn.us/news/pressrel/2023/water050823.html
Rosemount Public Works and Police Dual Campus
https://www.rosemountmn.gov/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=507
Rosemount's UMore Park
https://www.rosemountmn.gov/188/UMore-Development
https://psre.umn.edu/Real-Estate/UMore-Park/About-UMore-Park
Welcome to the Public Works Nerds podcast. Welcome to the Public Works Nerds podcast, a Public Works podcast of the nerds, by the nerds and for the nerds. I'm your host, Marc Culver, and today our special guest, and maybe a co-host, is the Rosemont Public Works director, nick Egger. Good morning Nick, good morning Mark. Thanks for joining us. Nick has been with Rosemont for about two years now, previously with the city of Hastings for a long time yeah, 19 years.
Nick Egger:Yeah, 19 years, all the way back to 02.
Marc Culver:Yeah, Started there and six of those were as the Public Works director. So you worked your way up through the ranks to the Public Works director for six years and we'll get a little bit more into that as we talk about our topic today. But, nick, it was also the president of the Minnesota chapter of the APWA last year. So thank you for your service for APWA. You're welcome.
Nick Egger:It was an honor and a privilege to do it.
Marc Culver:Yeah, I think we'll talk a little bit more about that towards the end of the podcast as well. And then, of course, we love award-winning guests, and Nick is award-winning and recipient of the several awards for this project, but I think probably the most prominent one is the National Small Cities Project of the Year Award from APWA for the Riverfront Renaissance Project at Hastings. So congratulations on that, thank you.
Nick Egger:Thank you. Fantastic project, very transformational, yeah, along the riverfront there, yes, yeah, remade the look and feel and experience of the downtown area of Hastings and it's received nothing but accolades from not only award presenters like you mentioned, apwa but the general public just loves it, yeah, and that's the most important part, right it is. Yeah.
Marc Culver:Yeah. So today we're going to talk about a couple of things from Nick's experience, starting with kind of an incident management event with a water contamination event in Hastings, how you manage that event, resulting changes you implemented as a result of it and such, and some conflict with that as well. So we'll get into that a little bit. And then after that I want to talk about because this kind of near and dear to my heart and some of the stuff I was working on in Roseville I want to talk about a little more upbeat topic and that's the new Police and Public Works Dual Facility Campus. Is that the official name of it?
Nick Egger:Well, I like to think of it as the Public Works and Police Got it Campus. Yeah, you got to switch them around. Yeah, it is kind of a running bit of humor in the office. I'll get into another reason why we have fun with that, and a little bit here. Good, good Cool.
Marc Culver:Well, anyway, that is currently under construction in Rosemont and we'll talk more about the particulars of that facility. So let's start off here. Actually, just talk a little bit about your career. How did you end up in Public Works, how did you end up in Hastings, and then why Rosemont?
Nick Egger:Oh boy. Well, I have to trace this back to. I was still in high school, actually, when I took on just a summer job at the city of White Bear Lake. I grew up in White Bear Lake, graduated from White Bear Lake High School and they had a I guess you might call it kind of a co-op sort of program at the high school where you could learn skills that are suitable to an office type of job or what have you for in a classroom at the school, but then you would spend part of a day or a couple of days a week in the workplace on the job, training if you will.
Nick Egger:And I did that, starting off in White Bear Lake's building department and it was essentially kind of clerical work, filing, computer data entry, some customer assistance, those sorts of things to begin with, and had a couple of years worth of that and I think I started there right before my senior year of high school, so I was about 17 at the time and worked through the senior year and they liked what they saw in me, I guess, and invited me back in the next summer as I began my college career and I did that sort of role for a couple of years and I was at a point at the U of M University of Minnesota which is where I didn't set off go first, go first, sky, you're all roll the ball. I was pursuing a mechanical engineering degree when I first started out there and that didn't go particularly well for me. I wasn't enjoying it, I was struggling with the curriculum and I had to kind of look myself in the mirror and ask whether I wanted to stick with that. And as I was going through that personal moment, it just coincidences happen and the city engineer at the time, mark Burch, needed some temporary help on a survey crew with a construction project the city was doing. I think this was the summer of 1999 or 2000.
Nick Egger:And I spent a week out in the field staking road alignments and pounding in gravel. We call them blue tops at the time. I don't know if that term resonates. Mark, you're on your head where you're hammering wooden stakes into very densely compacted gravel and you're getting a heck of a workout and sweating like crazy. But back to the point of it all is I ate it up. I just loved being around the construction projects and seeing how this stuff was built and it flipped a switch for me that civil engineering could be a future, and so the succeeding fall. I took an intro to civil engineering courses. I continued my curriculum there at the? U and that was the turning point, and so I switched majors and I really never looked back.
Marc Culver:So when you went into civil engineering, when you made that decision, were you all in on municipal and the public works side of it, or I was just curious? Was there anything else out of that intro to civil engineering that caught your eye?
Nick Egger:I distinctly remember watching. They had some videos that they presented to us and there was a I think it was a National Geographic episode of Panama Stake and about a bridge that was being built and that was very fascinating. I thought you know structures, monumental structure, you know right, but I didn't. I thought that was very cool, but I didn't set out to become a structural engineer. I actually had more of a fascination with transportation and traffic and pavement designs and all sorts of things, not so much all of the other components that you generally think of when it comes to municipal engineering. You know the stormwater or water supply, wastewater conveyance, like everything else.
Nick Egger:Yeah, everything the whole bag but had to learn it and I enjoyed it. So coming out of the OVM my focus point was transportation and you know that was the background that I spent a little bit more time on getting the degree.
Marc Culver:Yeah, and just real quick, my story on that is when I took that Civil 101 course it was the Top God I think I'm a little older than you, nick it was, you know, mid to late 90s. I was 95, 96 when I graduated. So mid 90s and Top God era era and I was all in on airport design. I was going to go out there and design airports and kind of finished my you know, selected my optional courses and that elective courses around that with transportation but kind of pavement design and things like that, and I thought I was going to design airports, pavement design on steroids, right when it comes to airplanes and the world.
Marc Culver:So it's just kind of interesting to hear other people's story. But I mean, I knew I was when I took steals in Conkran. Like no way am I going to be a structural engineer.
Nick Egger:And did you set out to you were interested in civil engineering from the get go?
Marc Culver:No, no, my, when I went in I actually thought I was going to be a chemical engineer, which is a very, very competitive program at the University of Minnesota. And I took organic chemistry. And I think organic chemistry doesn't show up on my transcript for some reason. So I knew once I took I love chemistry, but once I took organic I was like, no, no, this isn't bad. So then I switched to paper science engineering, because it was kind of a offset of like as like a little subset of chemical engineering. You know, you're kind of the chemistry of paper and that, and then the chemistry of paper.
Nick Egger:I don't think I've heard that phrase ever. You just coined it.
Marc Culver:There you go. And then you know I wasn't sure about getting stuck out in the middle of nowhere at some paper mill, you know, as I thought about it more and researched it some more. So then I switched to a second kind of environmental engineering and then got into the civil engineering program and, like I said, took the 101 program and like, hey, wait a minute, I could do some really cool things here with you know, cause I love deviation at the time. And then I got into computers and I mean this is not about me, this podcast on, but anyway. Well, I was trying to be a co yeah, I appreciate that.
Nick Egger:I appreciate that To get it and I'll banter back and forth.
Marc Culver:So anyway I eventually I was a real computer nerd in college and worked for the bookstore at the University of Minnesota. I was the only kid in the bookstore that could sell an IBM computer and that the technology side of it eventually got me into transportation and traffic and then that's then the rest of my career kind of snowballed from there. I never thought it'd be a municipal engineer, but it's just funny how things happen.
Nick Egger:It is I and that story and when I'm talking about, the more I learned from colleagues who are in this field, the more I realized that it's kind of a common thread. I almost fall into it by accident or not not by clear intentions. I'm sure there's plenty of people who did set out to be a civil engineer, but maybe that's a little more of the exception than the one, I'm not sure. Yeah, but it we're in good company, we are, we are, we are. You find your way somehow.
Marc Culver:It's interesting, though, that your time at White Bear Lake, you know, prior to you going to college, didn't kind of set you on that course earlier you know, maybe a bit.
Nick Egger:I mean, I think I really enjoyed the public service element and what I was doing there, no matter what role I played I mean, certainly when I was doing that clerical work earlier on I appreciated being able to assist customers that were coming in to get building permits or schedule an appointment for an inspection or have a question answered over the phone, all of those sorts of things. So you might say that I had that inclination towards wanting to be helpful in that sort of arena early on and just didn't know what specifically it would turn into until getting exposed to a little bit more along the way. Great, so fast forward from that. I got my degree from the University of Minnesota in 2002 and the job market was a little bit rough at the time we were coming off the 2001 kind of recession era and so I struggled for a few months before landing a full-time position and the internship or co-op at White Bear Lake ran its course and they needed to move on. And I understand that and really put some heat fire under me to go out and find that real world job. And I was fortunate enough to land the assistant city engineer position at the city of Hastings later that fall, wow, yeah. Yeah, they were looking to bring somebody on who could manage smaller scale projects to start with and then spin that up and turn it into a bit more of a leadership role over time and took to it very well, got involved in some new development type construction that was happening as well as some reconstruction of neighborhoods and really jumping in the deep end of all things civil municipal design related at the time, and I did that for a couple of years and they thought enough of me in 2005 to appoint me the acting city engineer when the city engineer at the time, dave Gurney, moved on.
Nick Egger:And we're tired, I'm doing the math here. Yeah, did you even have your PEE? Yet I did not. That's why I said what's been the acting city engineer? So, yeah, I'm into the job two and a half years, or something like that, and they say let's take a shot at this. And I did have the public works director, tom Montgomery was still there and he had us like Tom's got all up. Yes, very great leader. He could sign plans and be the official engineer record for stuff. Until I was able to take my test and get my experience though, yeah, yeah, really, that's great, like I say the deep end and just sink or swim. Yeah.
Nick Egger:So city engineers starting in 2005, will say, and then more official when I got my license in early or middle seven I think it was and did that role until about 2015 when Tom Montgomery himself retired and then I had the chance to become the public works director after him and took that on full steam ahead.
Nick Egger:I definitely felt that I was doing all the things I needed to to become that person and acquiring the knowledge and I had worked there for about 12, 13 years by that time so definitely had a lot of experiences directly applicable to the job and seeing things happen all around me and knowing the people and the places and the programs, policies, all of the stuff that would be necessary. And so took that on and that's what I did for the last six years of my time at Hastings and then in 2021, I was just getting to the point where I'm closing in on halfway through my career and maybe I wanna see if there's other things out there and that's when the Rosemont Opportunity came up and threw in for that and they liked me. They really liked me, apparently Panistence. I hope they still like me. I'm pretty sure they still like me there.
Nick Egger:But yeah, I got tipped off about that opportunity coming up from a good friend who also works there with me and I'll touch on that a little bit later. But yeah, it all worked out and I've been there since September of 2021. So just about two years ago and, man, it's a whirlwind. There is people ask me what's happening in Rosemont and I respond oftentimes with what's not happening in Rosemont because it's just gangbusters, growth and interesting projects and things going on.
Marc Culver:Yeah, and four listeners. Why don't you give a little background on, like the demographics and size of Rosemont, sure.
Nick Egger:Rosemont is now 27,000 residents strong and it's grown by, I think, somewhere around 10,000 people in the last 20 years, or there are more. So it's climbing very rapidly. Right now I think I've heard anecdotally outside of Lakeville or Maple Grove it's one of the few remaining Woodbury as well, hotbeds of growth in the metro or Fresno Lays. So we're all kind of in that mix together as being the focal points for where residential developments want to come and commercial interests are poking around and trying to cite their projects in town, and so that keeps me very busy, not only applying the comprehensive plan but also having to go off script and figure out some problems uniquely.
Marc Culver:Yeah, and just real quickly. Just Rosemont is located for our listeners across the world. Rosemont is located Twin Cities, metro area, kind of the Southeast area South, South.
Nick Egger:Yeah, about 20 minutes south of St Paul.
Marc Culver:Yeah, and you get some interesting components or factors to Rosemont that really make it an interesting place for development, including U-More, which was a huge university parcel of land. What was the university using that land for previously?
Nick Egger:Well, it has its origins in World War II era and it was a hub of ammunition production at the time gunpowder manufacturer, explosives. So it's kind of like T-cap of the South I very much so am and even larger. If I'm not mistaken, 5,000 acres plus or minus in it. It's maybe. Two thirds of it are contained within the city of Rosemont and the other thirds in Empire, and a little bit of coats, I think maybe, but enormous tract of land heavily polluted in many places, and it was turned over to the university at some point in time, I don't remember exactly when, but they've used it for a variety of research purposes over the years. Agriculture They've got a windmill down there that they do a lot of research with, but there's been portions of it that have slowly been cleaned up and made available to develop, and a large part of it is also used for aggregate mining. We have very rich on.
Marc Culver:And that was the other item I was gonna mention the gravel mines there and so huge opportunity as the reclamation plans play out in those areas. Exactly, right, yeah, so how many, well, roughly speaking, how many acres of development do you have coming up in the future in those two areas?
Nick Egger:Well, it started in late 21, early 22,. The very first residential development churned up in that land. It's called Amber Fields and that's 435 acres by itself and once that's built out it'll have 2,000 housing units in it and several commercial properties. So we're thinking roughly that's maybe another 5,000 people on its own just contained in that large, very large neighborhood. There's also a couple of extensive parcels that are being marketed towards light industrial type uses Right along County Road 42. And we've been working with a number of interesting parties on trying to make their dreams reality in those areas too, because we'd love to see that commercial base intensify within Rose Mount as well. It's very much wanting to get those sorts of draws there for jobs and for the things that go with, yeah, the backspace, the things that go with the rooftops and the population growth that'll bring other exciting attractions and things that people want yeah.
Marc Culver:Well, cool, well sounds like some really great opportunities there in Rose Mount and it's gonna be a lot of fun, interesting things to work on there for a while. But let us take a step back in time and talk about more of a conflict point in your career and managing that, and that is back in 2018,. Hastings experienced a water contamination event and that led to a whole slew of things. So why don't you just talk a little bit about what happened, what was the event, how you found out about it just from the beginning there, the phone call you got and what actions took place? And to respond to that, yeah, Ali.
Nick Egger:Well, like you say, 2018, this was August, september timeframe City's just going about its monthly bacteria testing regimen that is required on all public water suppliers, and those samples that our staff take are sent to labs and they get reports back that tell us that 100% of the time up to that point were absent of any sort of concerning things such as E coli bacteria and the like. But then we began to get a trickle of a few tests that were pinging back with some detections and I should clarify this goes down. The story, I guess, is that it was E coli and that's what it kind of the public naming convention is for this type of incident from the Department of Health. We never actually had that kind of detection, but we had a detection of other types of bacteria that are in that family. That the Department of Health says are indicators that you could have E coli proper Got it. So that's a learning point right there that it's not just straight up E coli that you have to have in order to get into a situation like this, and I'll get into what kind of concern and the naming what's in a name, what's in a name it mattered.
Nick Egger:We had those detections and they weren't going away. You take additional tests to try to validate it. Is this telling us what we think? It's telling us? Yes, it was, and at the time Hastings was one of the largest, if not the largest, public water supplier based on population in the entire state of Minnesota, which did not have ongoing permanent disinfection processes in our public water supply, which we felt was a huge luxury. We don't have to add chlorine. We're getting clean results for all this time.
Marc Culver:What's your water source, or what was Hastings water source?
Nick Egger:It's groundwater, entirely Jordanographer, so six well system down there all pumping up and directly into our system. Now we did have a nitrate removal plant that we turned up in mid 2000s that handled that issue on a few of the wells that were high in nitrate levels.
Marc Culver:But not all of the wells were being pumped into that treatment.
Nick Egger:Correct. Okay, it was just a partial system Got a treatment, but again, no chlorination, no type of disinfection, and so that, as it turned out, we had to step into an emergency response plan for dealing with this, and the Parliament of Health had a pretty good prescription of what needed to be done Very simple really, and even our staff knew what the answer was. But they issue, on the front end of this sort of result coming back, a emergency boil order, meaning you want to consume the water, you want to ingest it, drink it, cook with it, you need to boil it, or it's highly advised that you boil it first. And so while we're pushing that, messaging out, our crew, our Public Works Operations staff, is beginning a emergency shock chlorination of the water system, meaning we've got to add in a little bit higher concentration than what you might otherwise find at cities that are doing permanent ongoing disinfection. This is just to overwhelm the issue, but it really made the water. You could not consume it for a period of a couple of days there unless you boiled it, and even then it may not be the most pleasant experience from a taste order standpoint, being there's a higher concentration of chlorine at the front end when you're taking it out of the tap.
Nick Egger:That lasted a couple of days. We were out overnight the very first night, to the wee hours of the morning, checking out all of the extremities of the system to make sure that we were hitting the concentration levels that were needed. Handful of us both the operations crew and the Public Works Superintendent, then myself, you know I felt very much. This is a thing. I gotta be in the trenches with these guys. They're going through something that's they might never see again and I wanted, if nothing else, if I couldn't be a cog in the wheel, at least I'm there showing support and learning about what's going on, so that I'm knowledgeable to be able to communicate. Yeah, yeah, right.
Marc Culver:Yeah, which are both very important components and knowing what's going on so you can talk to your boss and your counsel about it and answer questions, but also, like you said, just be there to support your staff. Yeah, absolutely.
Nick Egger:And I'll pivot this into it became. You know, I touched on the simple simplicity of the process, right, you put some added chlorine in there, you check to make sure it's reaching the places it needs to and you shut the system down and let it cook or sit there, for I think it was a 48 hour period, might've been 24, I lose track on that. And then you come back and you gotta flush it out, you gotta test are we clear of the chlorine? And now we set in motion a back check on whether any bacteria is.
Marc Culver:So when you say flush it out, what did you do to flush the system out? What did you have to do to flush the system out?
Nick Egger:Fire hydrants. We just had a lot of them rip in all sorts of locations. We knew where our feed points were, which was the wells, all of our wells, and that kind of goes out in branches, just like a circulatory system in a human being. Now the wells are the hearts. I guess it's pushing the water out and we're opening up all kinds of hydrants to get that water to evacuate the system. And at times when we get complaints from the public, we'd advise them. You can help with this too by running your own tap water to help it get through your internal plumbing. But we had to come back and check to make sure that the bacteria was not present any longer and after we got the clearance we were told the boil water could be lifted.
Nick Egger:This was two days later, if I recall, by the Department of Health, and that's a big moment because now we're over the emergency of it and what we still have to earn the public trust back in a way and I'll go back to the communication part, because this really turned into.
Nick Egger:That's what it was about.
Nick Egger:It was a communications exercise and I come back to throughout my career time and time again, and this story might be an epitome of it, but it's more about communicating than anything really.
Nick Egger:We're knowledgeable in all this stuff, but we need to be able to convey that knowledge to a person who doesn't understand all the technical terms in plain language, and so the initial, when it comes to this incident, the initial push of information out there we were doing things that really hadn't been utilized in hastings for addressing a wide scale public emergency. We had windstorms and things of that nature, but they're short-lived and they're pretty straightforward. This one was a different animal just because of that element of is the water safe to drink or not? What's in it, how many people are affected. And we had different zones that we felt were applicable, different pressure zones in the city that were isolated from each other, and the test or the failures, the detections of the bacteria, were only in one part of the system too. So we had to get into things like making maps quickly on the fly and showing this is the boundary of the zone of impact and if you're outside this it really doesn't apply.
Marc Culver:But I was gonna ask for the people that were outside of that zone were there still skepticism?
Nick Egger:That hurt very much so, and so we kind of learned from that. It really didn't matter there was like it or not. There's gotta be a perception that the whole system is flawed and we can't trust Hastings' water for the time being. But creating messaging using all of our channels. We have social media. We had we did some Facebook live updates.
Nick Egger:Our communications coordinator and myself would talk about frequently asked questions, and this is the update. This is the stage we're at for now and get a whole website started for it, posting things with our local media folks. We, of course, had a bigger media outlets calling us or wanting to talk to us about where we were at, because it was a story that was attractive for them to report on, and this went through stages over several weeks thereafter and it really led to down the line after the smoke cleared, so to speak. We had to move into what do we do now with our system, and we were strongly urged by the Department of Health that you really ought to implement permanent chlorination, and so that turned into a project, turned into a feasibility study, first of what's the best way to achieve this and what are our options.
Marc Culver:And just quickly, the Minnesota Department of Health saying to you we strongly recommend you implement chlorination. Did you feel you could say no? I mean, was that kind of like we can't really say no to the Department of Health I mean they're not mandating it but or did you still feel like you had a choice?
Nick Egger:I think we concluded in our own minds that there's really no going back, because we took it in perspective that we run the risk of this exact same thing happening again. And does anybody wanna be there and go through this? And the answer is emphatically no. This was painful, this was chaos, you know, and it's if it did happen again. Now you're really feeling that fire of a bad reputation of some degree towards the city of Hastings. So we kind of felt, staff-wise, it was a foregone conclusion. We're gonna end up coronating our system. It's just no matter which way we choose to skin the cat and make it happen.
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Marc Culver:So you made the decision that You're going to at least explore permanent chlorination and you go through that whole process of doing a feasibility study and everything else like that. What are you doing with your system in the meantime?
Nick Egger:We left it on a trickle, more or less, how we fed chlorine into the system when we had to do the shock treatment right off the get go when the detections occurred.
Marc Culver:And did you have to do that at every? Well then, yes.
Nick Egger:Okay, we got special permission to because we didn't have all the equipment in the wells, but we did have a feed for fluoride, which all cities have to do. People didn't know that we're required to feed in a concentration of fluoride, so we used those pumps and just connected on liquid chlorine solution and that fit in place of the fluoride and we got a temporary stay or exception to not having to add fluoride in while we were working this all out. So that made the implementation of that response easy, but it wasn't going to be allowed to go on in perpetuity, nor was it really going to be the most cost effective way of doing things.
Marc Culver:And so then talk about the permanent solution and the process that you went through to get that implemented.
Nick Egger:Yeah. So, like I say, we went through a feasibility study to really determine what our options were that were available, what the costs were, what the trade-offs were, had kind of a matrix developed and we concluded that chlorination via gas system was what was necessary. We're going to be the most cost effective, easy to operate in long run. Again, we didn't have a centralized water treatment plant, so that sort of way of implementing it wasn't going to be possible. We had to install equipment at each of our well sites and that took I want to say it was about a year and a half from incident through construction. I use air quotes there because it's really just an installation of some mechanical equipment and plumbing equipment at the well sites and it was a cost of around a half million dollars up front.
Nick Egger:Of course, that came with its own set of PR outreach. We had to do an open house to kind of walk people through this. We took up external expertise on their offers to come and talk with whoever was going to be present at these open houses, because we needed that as a backstop. We felt that we could stand up there and try our hardest to convince people. This was not going to be a downside and there wasn't any big risks that we were taking and we really wanted to have that expert or a few experts there say, well, we could turn it over to them and say, hey, you don't have to take our word for it, these folks are experts in the field and they'll tell you anywhere else this is not a big deal, this is the standard, and so moves through that and then got our council on board to make it happen in terms of getting a contractor set up and doing the work.
Marc Culver:So I think that was in June of 2019 that you actually had approval to implement it, and then how much longer did it take after that to have the permanent?
Nick Egger:It took quite a while. I think we had our systems fully online late in 2019. So it was about a six or seven month timeframe after we had the go ahead.
Marc Culver:But nothing in government moves quickly. I'm going to presume you had to go out for bids and all of that, and so it does take time, but that's a little more than a year after the incident occurred that you had a permanent at the right place. I still think that's pretty impressive If you look at it from that perspective. So talk about some of the pain that you went through that and some of the lessons you learned. I mean, you talked about communication. You said words matter and maybe talking about just because we have no proof that E Coli is actually there but we have indicators that it might be, and blah, blah, blah. But just kind of talk about some of that pain that you went through.
Nick Egger:Well, it's a little bit of a lesson in demographics, I guess, I'll say on the communication side of things, because we were second guests a lot about why didn't you go door to door, knocking on every person's door and telling them, informing them of this issue, when we had to first push out the? It's an emergency. How many residents were?
Marc Culver:in Hastings at the time.
Nick Egger:About 22,000. Yeah, okay, so it's a lot of door doors to knock on right, and this was happening over part of the weekend to boot. Yeah, no-transcript. We felt strongly that our best bang for the box gonna be all of our digital media and the local radio station and our website and Facebook and those sorts of channels we also had this was a piece of it an emergency notification system that Dakota County operates that we felt could be to our advantage, where you can give them a message that is called out to a radius that you can tell them what to set and it'll ping everybody's phone number. It was registered and I think all the white pages are the ones that they populate their database with. But there's gotta be some numbers you don't hit from that. It's gonna be highly dependent on does the person pick up their phone? Do they have an answering machine or some kind of service? Do they get the message? You don't know.
Nick Egger:And there we realized there were some downfalls from using that and didn't get the saturation point that we understood could be possible from it. So we learned some things about that system and how beneficial or not it can be. Back to the demographics you've got people with cell phones can get everything in the palm of their hand. Yeah, there's tons of that out there, but there's also elderly demographic who are generally speaking as first or even have these sorts of devices. They got a landline. Maybe they don't even have an answer machine, we don't know.
Nick Egger:But the point is there were a number of folks who were pretty loud that we didn't get the word out to every possible human being we could, and that second guessing happened not only with that part of the equation, but on down the line when it came to the technology or systems we were going to use to provide chlorination. Or they're still not convinced that there's nothing wrong with the water system. Where did this happen? That was the biggest question, I think, that we heard over and over again Did you find the smoking gun? And we could not answer that. There were possible causes of something like this, ranging from a cross connection in a building somewhere, to maybe an open trench construction project that we had going on in a neighborhood at the time, to somehow a critter got into a piece of pipe that was gonna be put in the ground, and that was the root. Theories, only theories. How do you trace that down? And the Department of Health backed us on this, but they said they have not had an incident that they could pinpoint the root cause of.
Marc Culver:When it came to something like this you know when the test first came back positive for these trace elements of bacteria and that how many test results were showing that bacteria?
Nick Egger:I don't remember offhand on that mark it was a handful, yeah, and from different locations.
Marc Culver:And, like you said, it was just a part of the city. It wasn't widespread throughout the city, correct? So I mean you can use some of those results to try to like if it was that trench project in that area and some things like that. But like you said, it's a pressurized system where the water is moving all around all over. Good luck.
Nick Egger:Good luck.
Marc Culver:Hundreds of miles, literally Hundreds of miles of pipes and thousands of connection points yeah, you know, I think you mentioned somewhere I think I read it in an article you know it could be an irrigation system. Somebody was pulling out an irrigation system and didn't have a backflow preventer on, or something like that Exactly. So, yeah, it's, it's, it doesn't. You know, it's funny when I see movies or documentaries or whatever, it's always this who do we blame? Who do we blame? You know, and at some point it's like you know what, it doesn't matter, let's just fix the problem, let's move on.
Marc Culver:And, yeah, we want to make sure it doesn't happen again, or do our best to make sure it doesn't happen again. But and that's where the chlorination comes in Is rise to safeguard you from from that happening again. But yeah, that the tool, yeah. And the other thing is, you know, when it comes to our drinking supply, we are, we have enormous factors of safety in in. You know our testing, you know the, the parts per million that we're looking for. It isn't usually a level of where somebody's gonna really die from that. It's, it's getting to a danger level. But you know, there are, there's so much factor of safety in there. And I think you pointed out in one of the news articles that, as far as you guys know, nobody got sick from this, from this event, correct?
Nick Egger:Yeah, and there's anecdotes galore. Yeah, and you can only imagine when it comes to us using social media channels to get messaging out, the comment string that follows. That is yeah. When it comes to stuff like this, you're probably not gonna get a lot of positive comments. No, okay, an occasional thanks for doing what you did, but 99 out of 100 are gonna be just up in arms sorts of comments. The trolls all come out, and there were plenty of anecdotes in these comment strings of well, now I know why I was sick to my stomach for the last week. Okay, sure, yep, and if you say so, but we don't believe that's the case based on everything we know, which is a little more scientific and data-driven analysis of the situation.
Marc Culver:Okay, and then again, the amount of that material that you would have to consume to actually make you sick, just generally speaking, doesn't equate to people actually getting sick. But anyway, while that's interesting, that's one of those things you don't wanna go through, one of those more than once in your career.
Nick Egger:I might have uttered those exact words. Yeah, yeah, if I get no more of those I'll be good. But I think just an example of in public works we're first responders too. We deal with emergency situations, and this one was the epitome of that. In our circle you think of police and fire, and they darn sure respond to emergencies every single day, but we also have a level of importance in keeping the public safe. It's just a little more under the radar doing our thing every day, but occasionally we gotta step in on something like this and handle the messaging.
Nick Egger:They were not all heroes were blue or red. Yeah, we'll say that I think the orange ones came to the rescue on this one. And then it took a huge team too and I talked about communication being the utmost piece of this thing and that's myself and our communication coordinator. We were in the trenches there, having to talk constantly on what to say next, because controlling and maintaining informative but targeted information. That's critical with this sort of thing, and it sure came into the highest levels of importance when we encountered this issue.
Marc Culver:Yeah, and we did a podcast episode recently about communications and using social media. But I think this highlights the importance of having some communications professionals on staff to help with these events. And again, it's the everyday like okay, they're doing tweets and Facebook posts about park events and stuff like that and blah, blah blah. But it's when an event like this happens and they're helping you work with the media and getting messaging out and being proactive about those things versus reactive, that they can really show their importance and value to your organization.
Nick Egger:And helping us as engineers. You know, dumb it down or plain language. What's gonna work to get the point across without going hyper technical? Right?
Marc Culver:right, well, cool, well, I wanna ship gears here now. Talks about something a little more positive, a little more upbeat, a little more exciting, and that's your new Public Works facility. And congratulations, thank you. You've got that under construction. That's gonna be a lot of fun to work on. When do you expect that to be open?
Nick Egger:We're about two and a half months into construction right now and we hope to move in before Christmas of 2024. Great, so it's 16,. 17 month timeline is what they've projected on it and, yeah, it's finally coming to fruition here, and the congratulations really goes to the whole city of Rosemount and many staff and people that were involved long before myself. But I get to be part of this experience and the final stretch of it, which is pretty darn cool.
Marc Culver:Yeah, yeah, and it is a lot of work getting to this point. So talk a little bit about that. Like, what has the city gone through from a planning perspective to get to the point of building this Public Works facility? And, first of all, this is a brand new site, right, you're not?
Nick Egger:expanding your existing zone? Oh, yes, it is, and that's a big advantage, yep, so it doesn't impact your current operations Exactly. We can move in, we can kind of trickle into it, which will be a big luxury. When we're talking about the solar Christmas time over there, it's not exactly optimal for that, but we can stage things as needed because we'll still have the existing facilities to work out of.
Nick Egger:But this goes back, I wanna say, to the early 2010s in some space needs studies that the city did. It was recognizing that the city of Rosemount's gonna continue to grow, gonna be a hotbed for development activity and we're gonna need more people, more stuff to do the job and to keep a level of service up or improve it. And space needs studies were done. Some preliminary cost estimates were done, but no action was taken and you fast forward a few more years. You have some turnover and various staff and administration and police leadership and it gets brought back in 2018. And some refinements are done. They even brought in a citizens panel space needs study task force I think they called it and that drew some conclusions about what amount of space is gonna be appropriate, not only for existing service, unrevisions and staff and so forth, but where we headed? What do we need reasonably to grow into?
Nick Egger:For a while thereafter, that was set back down and put away for a little bit. I came on board, like I said, in 2021 and the momentum and the mindset of the city council leading into that time was we're finally gonna march down the way and make this thing happen. They had gone to the point of working with the National Guard and Flint Hills resources, who operates the very large refinery in Rose Mountain, on a three-way land swap. That would result in the city getting a 20 acre parcel on which to build the facility. 20 acres, 20 acres, yeah, 20 acres. That's not as big as you think when you build. I know 160,000 foot building.
Marc Culver:I was trying to squeeze something into a 10 acre site. Oh yeah, that's the net.
Nick Egger:Just ideally situated. It's not far from our current headquarters and it maintains kind of a central location from when you compare it to where the most dense part of the city is located and we've got a number of railroads that come through Rose Mountain. Really, the current location that we have the railroad is kind of inhibits our responsiveness to the eastern side of the city and causes mainly for police but also public works, so having a circuitous way around that when trains are coming through town. So it's gonna improve that for us and enable us to get out to the reaches of the city more easily and efficiently. But it consolidates all of our operations under one rule Public works right now is split amongst several buildings that are adjacent to City Hall and have been there for years and are woefully undersized.
Nick Egger:How big is your current public work space? You know I can't remember that offhand. I think it's less than 40,000 feet. Wow. And yeah, back to the space needs study. That was calling for well over 100,000 feet towards public works and that's what we're gonna end up with here at the end of this project. But it brings everything into one space and we can get all the staff under one roof.
Nick Egger:Engineering's gonna move in Engineering staff's currently at City Hall, so that creates some disconnects in communication and face-to-face interactions. And all of these things I say are they're invaluable when it comes to taking your department to the next level, and I have a direct experience with that from Hastings. We relocated our engineering department to the public workshop in 2008. And boy, over time it just proved to be an immeasurable impact in the synergy collaboration between the staff. You know you can often get siloed between you know here's the boots on the ground, the operations staff, the ones doing the physical work and the folks doing the cranking out the office work and not crossing pass. Very often that can develop some friction between you know divisions at times if they're not talking to each other regularly, and that was the case at Hastings before we moved in, and it drastically improved things and set us on a course where we could do much more together. And that's exactly what I see is the outcome that we're going to have in Rosemount too, once we move in together.
Nick Egger:So really looking forward to taking advantage of not only that, but we're going to have space for our entire fleet. Yeah, one big garage, cold storage building on site, a salt storage structure where we haven't had that before. We have to go to Dakota County to get salt for our trucks, so that's trips across town. Now, mind you, their main facility is in Empire. It's just right on the Rosemount border, but it sits three or four mile trip. I think We've been doing brining and we're going to build tanks into our new spot for expanding that use, but the efficiency gains are really going to pay off just having that space to park everything and not be shuttling seasonal equipment across town to a paid more storage facility at the U-more property. Again, that's one of the things we go out there for, but we can just shuffle it around in the same space, yeah.
Marc Culver:So much of what you're saying resonates with my experience in Roseville. Roseville still is leasing space offsite for seasonal equipment and vehicles and such, and going through that whole dance every fall and every spring of rotating stuff. Yeah, and they're working towards getting one funded too, so hopefully they finish it. What's been kind of surprising about, or anything surprised you about, like the design of this building, like some of the features that are in there, or anything like that?
Nick Egger:Well, I'll tell a little bit of a story about what one of the became a bit of a friction point. We're over it now. It's all good, but we spent a lot of breath on emergency backup generator. Oh, this facility is going to be the emergency operations center, if we should never have to enact that for the city and you know, along the technology there, meeting room space it's going to be a great setup for that.
Marc Culver:But when it comes to assigning priority on power supply, I can imagine where this is going, given who your maybe your co-existing partner is. But yeah, our housemates yeah.
Nick Egger:But yes, you almost said it there, mark it's the police department's going to take the priority on Yep, fine, great, no qualms, no argument with that. But we're pretty concerned about what about us? You know, can we fire up the entire mechanics bay and do all the things that we might need to do if we were having equipment break down in a tornado? You know, right, right, we are first responders too. Yeah, yeah, just was talking about that.
Nick Egger:So here's in our police department completely supported that point of view. But what I'm getting at is you they're doing computations on what size generator do we need for this outfit, because you know we want this thing to do. We don't want to have to be selective. With which breakers do we flip on and off to, you know, reroute the power? It's turned, and I heard this from our architect. He used the Apollo 13 analogy of you know, we got to power up the limb and you do it in the right sequence and then you're going to get the capsule back home with these guys alive in it. We didn't want it to become something like that Right.
Marc Culver:If you do it out of sequence, you're going to blow everything yeah.
Nick Egger:We need simplicity and not having to think about that because we're in the midst of, you know, a real world response of some kind and you just want to keep going about business as usual. But it was this debate between you know, guys. Really, what we're seeing to be able to put this thing on full power here is a one megawatt generator and huge expense, huge lean time and a lot of concern about that. As it came down to it, we're going with a 750, which itself is going to be enormous, but we were able to sell that and make sure that we got that, and it seems like 95% of our needs during an emergency are going to be taken care of, and there's always this factor of safety. They have to do calculations on, well, what's the theory? Tell us that you need versus. This is going to be the reality, and we think the reality is going to be, for we're fine, right? You know it's the mother of all scenarios where you need every last outlet in the building fired up on backup power.
Nick Egger:Yeah, not very likely. So you get into a little bit of the playing the odds there, but that was a unique encounter. Just the number of iterations or questions about what we'd prefer for layouts and exterior materials. You know you get into a million different decisions along the way at just developing the project scope, scale details. It's, it's crazy. I mean great appreciation for those who design these buildings because they're it's it's a lot like an infrastructure project. There's way more to it than what you see. Yeah, yeah.
Marc Culver:Absolutely yeah, and you've got a good team with the BKV and Ortele. They've been fantastic. I was, I was fortunate enough to work with them on our at Roseville, our concept plan for the facility there too. So they, they know, they know a lot of stuff and, like you said, this is a complexity of those facilities. You know it's not just putting up a pull bar and somewhere and storing vehicles inside of there. You know there's there's a lot of complexity in that open space and then your, your your conversation with the generator, they could definitely definitely see that you know a lot of decisions that that need to be made. Yeah, so so I think you said you had kind of some funny quips with the, with the. I think you said you kind of had some funny quips with the police on this whole thing.
Marc Culver:Oh, right, right, so talk a little tell a couple of little stories about your partnership with the police on this.
Nick Egger:It's from day one. I'll just, you know, say this up and get go. From day one, me arriving there, the dynamic and just the vibe and working with our police chief, it's been fantastic. You know, we, we got off to a great footing and you know very, very good relationship there and that's going to pay huge dividends down the line. We've kind of joked. Well, we're going to be living together. You know how we better get along. Chief understands me and my needs and I I understand his and it's. It's fantastic because we're. Even if we weren't going to be in the same place, you got to have a good relationship with your fellow departments because you're all going to depend on each other at one time or another. So why not spend a lot of energy nurturing that relationship, and so that's the baseline going into this thing. But we have a lot of fun as department heads. Just you know giving each other bad time playfully. You know joking around.
Nick Egger:So where that the story I was going to tell there was, we had a groundbreaking in early July for the facility and we it's kind of a thing to in the construction worker industry and guess I'll call it, and they get commemorative stickers for projects and they put them on their hard hats. And so we had one done up that was on two, the campus project, and maybe more often than not it gets referred to as a police and public works campus. Yeah, fine, great, you know, that's even the the title of it on the project website. But I, I've referred to it a little little selfishly, a little bit as a joke is no, it's the public works and police campus and so we had these stickers made that said police and public works campus and those that we had a fixed stack of those. But I, I made a special request to our construction manager who was doing the production of these things print them on to have a handful that would say the opposite, say public works and police campus.
Nick Egger:And I, I put one of those on my own hard hats and thinking when are they gonna notice this? Right, you know, and it's a little to my disappointment, they didn't pick up on it. It's Two words that you know. They both start with P, you know, you just glance at it. You probably got a, not even Click, but I had to kind of put it in their face. I'm bummed that you guys, you know this was a Directed towards our police chief, but a little bit of our city administrator too, because they got the, the standard stickers. Yep, like geez after all.
Nick Egger:This time you guys didn't notice this, you know, waving in front of them. Oh Geez, nick, you joke story and all they. They got a laugh out of it. But I was hoping that during the groundbreaking itself there would have been a what's going on here? How did you get that? It didn't didn't work out quite as I had planned, but we had a little chuckle off of it. I think, as it goes along, there might be turn around fair play and something waiting in the wings for me down the line. We will see, yeah, but what's cool that's it's.
Marc Culver:It's fun that you get that, that rapport, and you can.
Nick Egger:You guys are having fun with it too, so we, we, we use this phrase not just between us departments, but in our department head meetings from time to time. We laugh a lot, so we don't cry because, yeah, often times where it feels like it's it's us against the world, and you know we're dealing with lots of different problems and personalities out there and you gotta, you gotta ground yourself in humor because it's, it's therapeutic. Oh, I love that.
Marc Culver:I think that's right. Well, good, well, good luck with that. And maybe, maybe, as we increase our public works social media or public works nerd social media Presence, maybe we'll do a video tour With your drone. I should mention that, mr Drone UAV pilot.
Nick Egger:UAV SA us. Whatever the yeah, whatever the acronym, do your might be.
Marc Culver:So he's got another notch in his nerd belt With with his, with Nick here with his drones. But I'm sure you're gonna take lots of drone footage of already a construction progress and so maybe we'll, like I said, as we increase our social media presence, maybe we'll pull some of that up on the public. Oh, I love that too.
Nick Egger:Yeah, so I'd love to show it off. That's yeah, it's monumental projects. You gotta share the Gotta share with the world.
Marc Culver:Yeah, and it helps the colleagues so we're over our hour but I just wanted a quick touch. Usually we talk about technology. I think we touched on with UAV stuff and we'll get. Maybe we'll have you come back and talk more about where you see technology or you're maybe pushing some technology and to Rose money. That maybe where the new public works is. Let you help you with that. But I wanted to touch a little bit, given your past. You just you know you were the president of eight, the local chapter for APW a last year and I am such a proponent of our professional associations out there, whether it's APW a or in Minnesota. Here We've got a great one in the city engineer association in Minnesota. You've got Institute Tech transportation engineers. You've got ASCE. You've got, you know, all sorts of really great organizations for people to get involved. But maybe just talk about how you got involved. We're gonna take two minutes here, so and talk about how you got involved with APW and what it's meant for you personally and professionally.
Nick Egger:I'll talk really fast. Yeah, that's one. I was nudged into it by my predecessor and Hastings Tom Montgomery, you know to join back in 2005. So I'm coming up on about 20 years of being an active member. I didn't really do much with that for the first handful of years but then got asked to join one of the committees in 2011 I think it was and one of the missions of that that initial Upstart was starting a student chapter at the U of L no and I worked with a couple others to were part of that membership and special event committees to finally get that off the ground there and and that's a whole nother story in itself, a success story but that led to being asked to run for one of the director positions in APW after I had done some leadership things with that committee and I served as the director, public work, city engineer director within the board for a couple of years.
Nick Egger:That led to would you like to be considered for the secretary treasure? And once you do that, that puts you on a four-year track to go through the vice presidency, the president, and that's quite a that's quite a commitment there, and it is. It's a four-year deal, and so that happened in what was it? 2019 or 2020? I got elected to that secretary treasure and I'm just coming off the the presidency in 2022 and I'm the current past president, so I'm almost fading into obscurity here. But no, I love it, it's. It's brought me to things that I never could even imagine. I'm just so glad that I jumped in and the people you meet, the things you learn, the places you go it's, it's. You get way more out of it than you put it out that I was. Will you say that to the end?
Marc Culver:Yeah, yeah, no, I wholeheartedly agree and and I've been you know there's APWA does a great. You know, locally here they have their, their fall conference and their spring conference, which are both great events. They have a couple other social events throughout the year and you know, just like you, you talked about the committees. They have a wide range of committees that really help us out in our profession as we go around, particularly with, with advocacy and and but a lot of technical stuff too. So I you know, if you're listening to this and you are a public works professional or maintenance worker, what have you, at whatever level, whether an engineer or a maintenance worker or a technician, you know strongly encourage you to get involved in your local professional organizations and Just do what you can and and, if nothing else, just network and meet people and listen to their stories and you will learn From their stories so that when something happens to you, you know who you can call To get some advice on too. You know it's that's the. Really. For me, that's been the.
Marc Culver:The most beneficial thing out of these organizations is that network you develop. You know, a percent. Yeah, yeah, alright, well, great, this has been wonderful. We've talked about a lot. I probably was a. My eyes were a little too big for this episode perhaps, but but this has been great. Nick, thank you for coming in. I really appreciate it and we'll probably have you back at some point talk about your public works facility that so I Appreciate the opportunity to do it.
Nick Egger:Mark really enjoyed it and yeah, ask me back anytime, carry on sounds good.
Marc Culver:Alright, and one last thing before you go. If you have enjoyed this episode and the podcast in general, we ask that you help us spread the word. If you're on LinkedIn, comment. Don't just like it, but put a comment in there On one of the public works nerds posts. You can comment on our YouTube page. Now you can retweet one of our posts. You can. I don't even know how Instagram works, just you see at, my daughter will kill me for saying this, but however you repost an Instagram, do that, but better yet, tell your colleagues about the podcast. Thank you.
