St. Paul riverfront development costs more than expected
The plan to tear down St. Paul's long-vacant riverfront and reshape the downtown landscape is going to cost a lot more than anyone thought.
The Ramsey County Board is poised to approve a $17 million budget for demolishing the former West Publishing headquarters and the Ramsey County jail building. That's up from an initial $11.5 million budget by nearly 50 percent.
The cost overruns come in the middle of the project, now a little over one-third complete.
A report to the seven-member Ramsey County Board said workers have "uncovered significant latent conditions" as they tore down a succession of riverfront buildings, some dating back to the 19th century.
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Those conditions include the discovery of "significant quantities of asbestos," that weren't initially apparent, and a nearly $1 million worth of extra work to shore up the river bluff behind the existing buildings.
There were also extra costs because the work had to be interrupted while St. Paul public works rebuilt Kellogg Boulevard, and the two projects couldn't go on simultaneously, as originally planned.
Demolition started last summer, decades after West Publishing moved to Eagan, and a dozen years after Ramsey County relocated its Adult Detention Center to the Lafayette Park neighborhood.
The West Headquarters is actually an amalgam of about a half dozen different structures, including a former cold-storage warehouse dating back to the 1880s.
The complex was turned over to Ramsey County when West left St. Paul in 1992. The county used the buildings for government offices until 2013.
The county tried unsuccessfully to interest developers in the site, either for re-use or as a tear down project, and decided in 2014 to sell $11.5 million in bonds to finance the demolition, hoping to attract as much as $150 million in new development on the site.