(City of Bend recently opened a new Public Works Campus at Juniper Ridge, an improvement necessary to meet continued growth | Photo courtesy of City of Bend)
With Bend’s rapid growth placing increasing pressure on essential infrastructure and City services, the opening of the new Public Works Campus at Juniper Ridge marks one of the most significant municipal investments in recent years. For Public Works Director Mike Buettner, the campus represents both a long-overdue upgrade and a foundational step in preparing Bend for decades of continued expansion.
“It means many things for the City of Bend and our ability to serve this growing community,” Buettner said. “But most importantly, the new Public Works Campus allows us to simply keep pace with the community from a space standpoint. We have more equipment and more staff than we used to; all the things we need to keep up with the growing amount of roads and water facilities to build and maintain.”
For years, Bend’s Transportation and Mobility and Water Services teams operated out of aging, undersized facilities that could no longer meet the needs of a city growing past 105,000 residents. “Existing buildings were at capacity and at the end of their useful lives,” Buettner explained. “The aging facilities at 15th Street campus that used to house the Transportation and Mobility Department were no longer able to accommodate the staff needed to maintain our streets, bikeways and bridges. Similarly, the small facilities that the Water Services Department used at the Boyd Acres campus lacked the office space and storage space needed for a department providing water, sewer and stormwater services to a community of Bend’s size.”
Consolidating Engineering staff at the new campus also increases access and collaboration for city teams, while freeing up much needed space at the City’s downtown campus.
Major Operational Upgrades
Among the departments benefiting most directly from the new investment is the City’s Fleet team, responsible for maintaining more than 800 pieces of equipment ranging from fire engines to specialized sweepers.
“Our Fleet Department never really had adequate facilities to perform their work,” Buettner said. The former facility had once been a refrigeration manufacturing site and was never intended for modern fleet service needs. “This new facility is designed for those purposes and allows our Fleet maintenance staff to perform more thorough work more efficiently.”
The campus also dramatically reshapes how Public Works teams interact. Previously, more than 250 staff were scattered across three locations, making collaboration difficult.
“The new campus provides more space for our staff to work more closely to one another and provides greater opportunity for collaboration where it might not have happened in the past,” Buettner said. “Those small, regular interactions lead to a more well connected, more cohesive workgroup and organization over time.”
Practical boosts to efficiency were also built into the design, such as indoor vehicle storage. “The vehicles are protected from weather… and they’re also faster and easier to deploy when it’s time to get to work.” Residents will soon experience the advantages of the new campus firsthand. Several components are slated for public use beginning in early 2026. “Some of those include publicly available meeting rooms that will be available for City-related community meetings. There’s a water conservation demonstration garden that will be completed in early 2026 as well that we hope is used to inspire a more water-conscious community moving forward,” Buettner said. In the long run, he anticipates the campus will become a regular community meeting location, acting as a host site for workshops, council work sessions and other civic gatherings.
A Model for Sustainable Public Development
Sustainability was a major priority throughout the project. The campus is on track to achieve LEED Gold certification and was designed with net-zero energy use in mind. “Perhaps the most notable is the net-zero energy use goal for the facility,” Buettner said. “The goal for this facility is to produce more energy than it consumes.” This target aligns with Bend’s Community Climate Action Plan.
The City also emphasized site-sensitive development. “Another noteworthy attribute of the new campus is the preservation of existing landscape – multiple 100-year-old junipers and rock outcroppings were preserved as a result.”
Buettner is also looking forward to public programming onsite. “I’m looking forward to hosting workshops focused on waterwise landscaping and using the demonstration garden as part of the education.”
The City began evaluating locations in 2018 and compared the cost of upgrading existing sites against building new. Juniper Ridge emerged as the strongest option.
“In 2021, the Bend City Council approved an area within Juniper Ridge for the new Public Works Campus, because it has adequate space and the City owns land there (which lowers the overall cost),” Buettner noted. It also aligned with the City’s broader vision of supporting development in the northern portion of Bend. “Ultimately, the property at Juniper Ridge provided the best combination of cost and available land.”
Of all the new features, Buettner’s personal favorite is the headquarters’ first floor gathering space. “The first floor of the Headquarters building is called the ‘Intersection’ and is absolutely that – a place that you can run into just about anyone associated with public works,” he said. The flexible environment offers indoor/outdoor seating, an open-air kitchen and space for informal collaboration.
The City will continue fine-tuning operations in the new space. Public tours and art-viewing opportunities are expected in early 2026. With the new campus operational, Bend is better positioned to maintain the transportation network, water systems and essential services that underpin the city’s quality of life.
As Buettner put it: “This new campus positions us to continue to provide crucial, core public services… well into the future.”
