THOUSAND OAKS : Crews Report to New Municipal Service Yard

Thousand Oaks’ street maintenance, landscaping and water crews reported to work Monday at the new municipal service yard, a $4.3-million complex that replaces an aged, inefficient facility.

The move to the new service yard, on a 10-acre lot at the end of Rancho Conejo Boulevard, comes just as the city is merging the public works and utilities departments under the direction of Donald Nelson.

Most of the 170 employees who work out of the service yard belong to one of the two departments. They use the yard as a home base for maintenance, repair and other field work.

“It’s perfect timing,” said Mel Henson, a superintendent at the service yard. “It’s all coming together at once. I think we will be a more efficient operation once we get past the transition.”

Thousand Oaks’ new service yard features an emergency power generator, a single warehouse for both the utilities and public works departments, a leak-proof storage site for hazardous waste and a more-secure parking lot.

“We’ve had an opportunity here to design a facility looking forward to our needs over the next 15 to 20 years,” Nelson said.

The high-tech features includes an eight-pump natural gas fueling station--moved to the new yard from the DeHavilland Drive site--to serve the city’s five clean-burning pickup trucks.

By September, when the city is due to receive two more trucks and four Thousand Oaks Transit buses that run on natural gas, the fueling station will be upgraded, said Robert Miller, fleet services supervisor. The new technology will allow staff members to fuel the natural-gas vehicles in five minutes, instead of leaving them plugged into the fueling stations overnight.

Amgen, the massive biotechnology firm, gave the city land for the new service yard and paid $3.1 million toward construction.

In exchange, Amgen took over the old municipal service center, situated near the firm’s main campus on DeHavilland Drive. Amgen plans to build new research facilities, office space and parking structures on that land and other nearby parcels.