Lexington owns an old water plant on a busy road. Here’s what the town might do with it
A two-story red brick building and a handful of other dilapidated structures sit mostly unused along the busy stretch of South Lake Drive that connects downtown Lexington to Interstate 20. Besides the town’s parks department workers who frequent the old water plant, the 3.5 acre plot doesn’t draw much attention.
As the town of around 25,000 people has seen its downtown area spring up in the last few years — with a host of new restaurants, breweries and a town-funded amphitheater — officials could set aside funds to turn the property owned by the town into a new park.
While still in the earliest stages, Lexington leaders have circled the plant, which houses some of the town’s parks department staff, as a possible candidate for $5.5 million in renovations paid for by the fees the town collects from developers to fund infrastructure and capital improvement projects. The renovations could include building a park on the property and moving all parks department staff to a new headquarters there.
Before any movement could be officially made at the property, the town council would have to vote to use the impact fee money towards that project. Initial plans for the park were discussed by council in 2020, when the town first enacted the impact fee.
The idea for creating a new park at the space would be two-fold: preserve a historic building by giving it a new use and better connect the town’s existing parks, like Virginia Hylton Park and Gibson Pond Park, to each other.
The property, at 503 S. Lake Drive, was used as a water plant from around the mid-1920s until 2002. The town has owned it for almost a century after a man by the name of H.D. George sold the property to the town for a whopping $5, equivalent to around $88 by today’s standards, in November 1925, according to county property records.
The town could use more than a million times that amount in impact fees to fund the renovations at the space – $1.7 million out of the $2.1 million set aside for the parks and recreation department and $3.8 million of the $9 million set aside for municipal facility upgrades. Other impact fee funds are aimed at being used to improve parking in certain parks and upgrade town facilities.
The funds would tentatively be set aside for use over a five-year period, with money to be used beginning in 2027 through 2029. A town spokesperson told The State that the “vision [for the space] hasn’t been completed in detail.”
The move to revamp the property and transform it into a welcome center for the parks and recreation department comes almost a year after Lexington wrapped up a massive, two-year-long renovation of Virginia Hylton Park – a $9.8 million project that more than doubled the size of the downtown park.
That project was funded, in part, by the town’s impact fees. Council leaders for the municipality of around 25,000 people approved the fee five years ago, tacking on a one-time expense for new commercial and residential developments in order to pay for the infrastructure required to keep the burgeoning town afloat.
The collected money is used as supplemental funding for the town to complete infrastructure projects in three categories: transportation, parks and recreation and municipal facilities. The intention being that the town would be able to fund projects without raising taxes on people who already live in Lexington, as both the county and the town have grown exponentially over the last decade and town officials grapple with solutions for keeping up.
The old water plant sits along the busy road that connects Lexington’s downtown to Interstate 20 – the road saw an average of 23,800 cars each day in 2023, according to state Department of Transportation traffic counts.
