Corpus Christi (KIII News) — City staff outlined plans this week to try and encourage a developer to come up with a creative way to reuse an old abandoned building in Calallen that used to be a City water plant.
The City wants to find out if a developer is interested in breathing new life into the John Cunningham water plant near Labonte Park, which was originally built in 1892.
The facility lies along the Nueces River at the Corpus Christi city limits.
"A real opportunity to hopefully find something we could do with the property," said Dan McGinn, Director of Planning for the City of Corpus Christi. "Demolition is a potential option, but we felt like there's been a lot of success stories from across South Texas of adaptive-type reuses for these facilities, and we wanted to take a shot at that first."
During a presentation to City Council this week examples of such transformations were displayed, like the old water plant in Victoria, another converted facility in Seguin, and still another remodeled plant in Austin.
"It's an eyesore. It's one of our major corridors into the community from San Antonio," McGinn said. "The building is not in great shape. There's a safety concern. Sometimes there's vandalism at the location."
A video tour of the facility was shown to council. McGinn showed how different parts of the water plant look now and suggested a developer could use many of them for businesses. He pointed out that the latest count shows an average of 42,000 motorists a day go past the site.
McGinn said the City is open to proposals for interest for the next 60 days. Then they'll look for more detailed proposals.
City staff will bring back any interested proposals to City Council in the near future.
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