Largest remodel in decades coming to Eden Prairie City Center

Hammers will start swinging in late March or April at the Eden Prairie City Center, beginning the largest remodel there since the former CPT Corp. headquarters was purchased in 1993 and turned into city hall.

The project will primarily remodel the western two-thirds of the building, creating larger police quarters with indoor parking for squad cars. It also includes general office remodeling to relocate the lower-level Facilities and IT departments, as well as meeting rooms, to city hall’s main level. The city plans to seek rent-paying tenants for the vacated lower-level space.

Twenty-five primary construction contracts were approved Tuesday, Jan. 21, by the Eden Prairie City Council. One more contact – for fire protection construction in the building – will be rebid to get a better price.

Seven of those 25 contracts exceed $1 million, including a $5 million contract for electrical work and a $4.7 million contract for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC).

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All told, construction contracts total about $21.2 million. With contingency and soft costs, the project’s price tag is an estimated $26.75 million. The remodeling project will be paid for with $26.5 million in bonding debt and a $250,000 refund of state sales tax that’s coming to the city.

Construction is expected to wrap up in May 2026, with move-in during July and August of that year.

Remodel accommodates growing police force

The Eden Prairie Police Department had 47 officers when it moved into 30,000 square feet of lower-level space in the 1990s. Today, the department is authorized for 75 officers, but its fleet is still parked outside and must be moved whenever snow plows clear the lot.

“We are quite literally bursting at the seams,” said Police Chief Matt Sackett, describing the project as one that meets the needs of the department and the community.

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For example, the city has just been awarded a state grant to add a second social worker to the department. “Super excited to get another social worker,” Sackett said, “but right now, there literally is no office for them.”

Sackett said the project will also keep Eden Prairie police on the leading edge of technology. An alternate bid item added to the project Tuesday includes the construction of a “Faraday Room,” a special enclosure that blocks inbound and outbound wireless communication signals. Police departments use these rooms to securely examine digital evidence from phones and other devices, preventing data tampering or remote deletion during investigations and ensuring the integrity of the evidence collected.

The project remodels roughly 112,000 square feet of the building, and about 85,000 square feet of that is for the Police Department – 50,000 square feet of offices, plus 35,000 square feet of indoor garage space that city officials say will extend the life of emergency vehicles, including some electric ones. Some outdoor parking, surrounded by a security fence, will also be provided.

When the project is complete, police cars responding to emergencies will typically exit to the north, onto Technology Drive, instead of to the east, onto busy Mitchell Road, as they do now.

The BKV Group, hired by the city as architects, said the project’s goal is to provide enough space for the next 20 years.

It’s another shift in the building’s long history. It was built in the late 1970s by CPT Corp. and expanded in the early 1980s. The manufacturer of early word processors was, at its peak, the fifth-largest high-tech company in Minnesota, according to Wikipedia – behind only 3M, Honeywell, Control Data, and Medtronic – but floundered when personal computers began to proliferate.

After the city purchased the building, the west end was rented to Eden Prairie Schools and businesses such as C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Supervalu, and UNFI. Those tenants are gone, providing the space needed for police expansion, other city departments, and public meeting rooms.

Lower-level meeting space now known as the Garden Room and the Heritage Rooms will move upstairs, to the main level. The history museum operated by the Eden Prairie Historical Society will remain downstairs, city officials said.