Construction is underway on the new administrative headquarters and operations building of the Lincoln County Power District (LCPD).
Located on the east side of U.S. 93, just a bit north of the entrance to Cathedral Gorge State Park, work has been progressing since mid-August.
District General Manager Dave Luttrell said, “We have been looking at this for over 10 years and just waiting until it made the most sense to move forward with construction. This past winter, the board decided it was time to start moving forward. We hired an architect from St. George for the design this past spring. Put the project out to bid in the summer and awarded the contract to Watts Construction of St. George.”
Some years ago, LCPD had another architect make a design, “but this is about half the size of what that one was, but will be more than double what we currently have,” Luttrell said.
He said the construction of the new headquarters will be done in a series of stages. “This first stage is the 4,300 square-foot administration section and 1,500 square-foot operations area. They are two separate buildings, connected by a little breezeway. Then, in another 12-18 months, we’ll start moving the warehouse and the maintenance shop. That way we can kind of keep the costs under control. It will take about three years to fully move from up on the hill [at the Caselton Mine] to this new site.”
He said the operations building “is a dedicated building that has all our electrical systems and grids and will be a limited access.”
Luttrell expects construction work in this first stage will be complete by early December, “but we won’t move in until probably late January because we have some electrical work to do to get our equipment set up.”
Luttrell has been with LCPD as an engineer since 1988 and has been general manager since 2011.
The Caselton site has been in service since 1936 and, Luttrell said, “We are planning to have this new facility be able to carry us and our future needs for the next 80-plus years.”
He noted that at Caselton, “there was not land to expand; [there was] very little we could do there; [it was] not in a very convenient location for our customers or for our ability to respond quickly to various needs and outages. We have known we needed to move for quite a few years; it was just figuring out when would be the right time. The new facility will serve Lincoln County very, very well.”
