Dublin City Council is delighted to announce that it has opened its new North City Operations Depot in Ballymun.
This state of the art staff-only facility includes:
- Four-storey office and welfare building with locker rooms, shower facilities, serviced canteen, laundry facilities and drying rooms along with briefing rooms, training rooms and office accommodation.
- New custom built operations workshops including metal, painting, electrical, carpentry and fleet workshops as well as a signage and fleet branding unit.
- A large salt barn with capacity for 1,200 tonnes of road salt.
- Purpose-built Central Stores.
- A garage facility for parking designated vehicles requiring frost protection.
- Waste compaction area.
- Vehicle wash area.
- Equipment storage areas.
- Multi-storey car park accommodating over 100 small fleet vehicles, approximately 200 staff vehicles and over 200 bicycle spa.
The Lord Mayor of Dublin Caroline Conroy officially opened the site, saying, “this is a fantastic day for Dublin City Council and for the Ballymun area. The new depot will provide high quality facilities to enable staff to operate more safely, efficiently and effectively. It will result in better services and help the City Council meet its climate action targets. It’s a major boost for Ballymun and crucially, it also frees up some existing depot sites for social housing.”
The budget for the North City Operations Depot was €74.4m and while the final cost won’t be available for a few months, the project is on track to come in on budget.
Construction work began on the site, which is opposite IKEA, in May 2021 following the easing of Covid restrictions.
Staff have begun the process of moving into the depot and this process will continue over the next few months.
When the process is complete, almost 600 staff will have relocated into the new depot from 16 smaller depots around the north side of the city.
The land on which some of these smaller depots are located will now be released for more appropriate development including the provision of much needed social housing units.
The purpose-built depot brings together operations from waste management, housing maintenance, electrical services, public lighting, traffic, surface water maintenance, drainage planning and road maintenance into one campus for the first time.
Dublin City Council Project Engineer, Sharon McMahon said, “the North City Operations Depot is a reflection of the City Council’s huge commitment to its direct labour staff. The high quality facilities will transform the way our direct labour workforce operate, facilitating greater inter-departmental co-operation and better co-ordination of services and staff. These factors will combine to improve service delivery for the public and make our operational services more efficient for many years to come.”
The new depot includes a range of landscape features which will greatly enhance biodiversity in the area including a new pond, tree planting and new wildflower meadow planting.
As well as incorporating ground based (horizontal) landscape features, the new development also makes use of vertical features through the use of vertical Living Wall landscape. On the northern and southern elevations of the Multi-Story carpark a series of vertical planting bays have been provided which not only provide an attractive appearance but also make a real contribution to the environment. This Living Wall feature assists in cleaning the air through entrapment of nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter and also supports habitat for insects and birdlife.
There is a new Civic Amenity recycling centre beside the depot, which will be open to the public and will facilitate recycling of all the normal dry recyclables (including paper / cans / tetra pak / cardboard / glass bottles / plastic bottles), as well as other items such as electrical goods and bulky waste.
Source: Dublin City Council
