Published: Mar. 18, 2025 at 10:57 PM EDT
LAURIUM, Mich. (WLUC) – Tuesday’s Laurium Village Council meeting provided a number of updates in the aftermath of the Department of Public Works building fire last month.
The council voted unanimously to receive assistance from Moyle Construction in the process of building a new DPW building. The company will do engineering, design and insurance work without any cost to the village. The company is not contracted to build the building.
“Obviously, none of us have had experience rebuilding or building something of this nature,” Village Manager Ian Lewis said. “Our buildings are a hundred years old. To us, who do we look to for expertise and experience? Moyle is a big industry here. We just had a conversation to learn the process of everything. If the insurance company were to say, ‘Hey, we need you to get more bids,’ there’s nothing holding us to just this one company.”
Council President Pro Tem Jeff Erickson and trustees Andrew Erickson and John Galbraith were also selected for a committee to investigate building a cold storage space for DPW workers to work on heavy machinery. Lewis says a temporary village equipment garage, donated by the North Houghton County Water & Sewer Authority until June 2026, is too small for maintaining loaders and graders.
“Right now, it’s out for bids to see how much materials would cost for it,” Lewis continued. “We’ll likely get bids on how much it would cost to have a secondary party build it instead of the public works crew. The council will then review everything all together and determine what’s the best way of going (forward).”
Erickson also announced the village had won a bid on a larger dump truck, filling in for two smaller dump trucks that were lost.
Lewis also says the village has been receiving donations from various groups. This includes a sidewalk cleaner from BOSS Snowplow and tools donations from Milwaukee.
“Milwaukee Tool actually reached out to us and said, ‘Hey, we want to help you out,’” Lewis added. “They graciously donated approximately $15,000 worth of tools out of an order that we placed. It’s allowed us to start our rebuild process of the DPW in terms of tooling while we wait for insurance proceeds to come in.”
Lewis says the Michigan House Cafe and Brew Pub is offering a drink special and will donate $3 of each drink to the village for reconstruction efforts.
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