Construction underway next to the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) Farmville residency office on Commerce Road will result in the creation of a maintenance facility servicing VDOT’s vehicles.

“The facility that they’re building is a mechanic’s shop,” VDOT Resident Engineer Scott D. Frederick said.

He noted that the shop is being built through VDOT’s facilities office, which is managing the specifics, but he said he had general information pertaining to the project.

“I’m pretty sure it has six bays inside of it for working on vehicles,” he said. “… And then there’s going to be a fuel island as well.”

In terms of the VDOT vehicles it can service, Frederick said, “It’ll do all of our licensed equipment, which is any kind of our dump trucks, tandem dumps and single-axle dumps. It’ll do any of our non-licensed equipment, which is tractors, graders, rollers. Basically, anything we own, we can work on it in that shop. And then even our small vehicles, like our pickup trucks, and we have a few passenger cars, if they need anything even as minor as brakes and stuff like that, they can do that there.”

He spoke to how the presence of this shop next door to the Farmville residency office will impact VDOT’s services to the community.

“I think it’s going to make it better,” he said. “We’ve always provided service. We’ve been able to accomplish our mission the way we’re structured now. Last winter, we moved the residency office from Dillwyn to here. So since we’ve done that, we used to be able to walk right across the parking lot and talk to our shop, whereas now, we can call them, but otherwise, we’re kind of split as far as doing some of our business here in Farmville and doing the shop maintenance in Dillwyn still. So once the shop here gets finished, we’ll be all kind of back on the same property again, and I think it’ll make it easier to communicate with each other. There’s just things you lose touch on being so far apart; it’s going to remove that from the equation.”

Frederick said construction on the shop is going to be completed in approximately one year.