The Oregon Department of Transportation has started construction on the first of two projects in Central Oregon worth a combined value of more than $7 million.

“That’s a pretty big boost for the economy,” ODOT spokesman Peter Murphy said.

Work began earlier this winter on a new building to house some employees at its Region 4 offices in Bend, and in May, the agency expects to start erecting a new maintenance facility east of Sisters.

Currently, 57 employees work in five buildings on ODOT’s Region 4 campus near Northeast Third Street and Northeast Empire Avenue in Bend.

The state agency will consolidate the employees into a new two-story, 21,000-square-foot building, according to documents on file with the city of Bend.

The building, which should be completed this fall, will allow ODOT to save money by owning the property instead of paying rent on the buildings where the employees work now. The agency should break even in 17 years, according to information on its website.

East of Sisters on state Highway 126, ODOT will construct a maintenance facility to replace the one on the west edge of the city that’s located on land owned by the U.S. Forest Service. The Forest Service wants to sell the land.

On Tuesday, ODOT started soliciting bids for the new project, which should cost between $2.7 million and $3.3 million.

Construction of the 10,000-square-foot building, on 22.5 acres of land where ODOT has a gravel pit, should start in May and finish in November or December, said Pat Creedican, ODOT’s Central Oregon district manager.

The building will include all the same elements as the current one: a large garage, a crew room, an office, a bathroom and storage space. The employee count for the facility — six in the summer, eight in the winter — will stay the same after the new building is open, Creedican said.

“Most of it is just a garage for the equipment, to keep it out of the weather, safe from vandalism,” he said.

Creedican said ODOT plans to heat and cool the building with a solar thermal heating system and a geothermal energy system, but costs will determine whether those technologies will be implemented.

State legislators in 2008 considered consolidating the Sisters and Bend maintenance facilities when they heard that buying new land and constructing a building could cost $6.4 million. Then they found out about ODOT’s land east of Sisters, according to The Bulletin’s archives.

The state agency wanted to keep the facility in Sisters because it’s closer than Bend to Santiam Pass, and the snowplows and sanding trucks that keep the road to the summit clear are stationed in Sisters.

Locating the facility east of Sisters will require trucks and plows to travel along Main Street or other narrow roads through Sisters.