North Country Food Bank Director Susie Novak announced to the Polk County Commissioners Tuesday morning that the food bank would be moving their operations to East Grand Forks. The food bank will purchase a 35,000 square foot facility at 1011 11th Ave NE in East Grand Forks. The new space will effectively double the warehouse space of their current location.
Novak said the new facility, built-in 1997 as a temporary location for Sacred Heart after the flood, will cost about $4 million less than building a new facility and is slightly larger than the facility they were designing in Crookston. “We’ve been working on this project for quite a while now,” said Novak. “In doing some due diligence, we were reevaluating where we were in our building project and fundraising. We came across a building that is 35,000 square feet, and we were planning to build about 30,000 square feet. It’s an existing building that would probably save us about $4 million in project cost. That’s really important to us. The one big thing is it’s in East Grand Forks, not Crookston. That’s the one drawback. It was never our intent to move out of Crookston, but that happens to be where this suitable building is situated right now.”
The facility the food bank was designing had a matching bond from the State of Minnesota for its construction. Novak said they would not utilize bonding for the purchase in East Grand Forks. “We would have the option of pursuing having it transfer for the acquisition of the existing building,” said Novak. “But looking at the project and the state of the building were going to acquire it would actually add more to the project cost then we’d get back in the bonding funding. We’ll actually pursue this without the bonding funding. We’ll do it on our own. We’ve spent some money on the design and work for the new building, so we still have to raise about $1-1.5 million which we’re working on right now.”
Novak said there are financing options the food bank may utilize to cover the cost of the new facility if they are unable to raise the rest of the funds before purchasing the building. “If we need to in the meantime we can do some interim financing to move forward with the project,” said Novak. “This building will require a little bit of modification. We’ll have to take down some walls, add freezer/cooler space and loadings docks. Once that is done we can be operational out of them there. The goal is by the end of this year. Once that is done it will increase our capacity so much, so quickly we’ll be able to do a lot more work getting food out to our agency partners across the region.”
Volunteer work is vital to the food bank, and Novak hopes volunteers from Crookston, including UMC, will still be interested in helping out. “Volunteer work is so important to us,” said Novak. “In our work, we use volunteers a lot, and Crookston has been fantastic. I always tell the rest of our service area in the 21 counties that Crookston bears the bulk of the volunteer burden in our service area as most come from here. The new location does give us access to maybe more groups in bigger numbers from Grand Forks. Hopefully, some will still come over from UMC.”
Novak said the food bank would need to work with the Crookston community in the coming months to transfer operation of the Crookston food shelf. Once that is done, the food bank would support the food shelf as it does the other food shelves throughout northwest Minnesota. “Another thing that is unique to Crookston is that we run the food shelf,” said Novak. “So, when we move to East Grand Forks, the food shelf needs to stay here in Crookston. We want to work with the community over the next month or two to get people to manage, handle, and operate the food shelf. And help them get set up and rolling. We don’t want to leave the community it a lurch at all. We want there to be somewhere that people can go for food. And then we’ll still support it in the same way that we support all 52 food shelves in our service area.”
The property the food bank was intending to build on in Crookston along North Broadway was donated to the food bank with no strings attached to qualify for the bonding originally. This morning for sale signs went up on the property which is located to the south of the Agassiz Townhomes.
