Brandon Water Treatment Plant
Overview
For the City of Brandon's water treatment plant expansion in the Sioux Falls metro, Dimension Sign delivered the entire Section 10 14 00 signage scope — a full interior ADA identification program across two buildings and a color-matched cast dedication plaque — for general contractor Rice Lake West. Every sign was drawn, submitted, reviewed by the engineer of record, corrected, and approved before a single one was cut. The whole program was fabricated in Minnesota and shipped to South Dakota. We never set foot on the site.
01 / The challenge
An expanding municipal water plant more than two hundred miles from the shop, across state lines, where the signage existed entirely on paper. We worked to the engineer's contract documents — AE2S's Section 10 14 00 and six addenda — through a formal submittal and RFI loop that ran from the first submittal in October 2022 to the plaque's January 2025 dedication. A working treatment plant is chlorine rooms, RO acid storage, filter and pump rooms across multiple levels and two buildings; correct, code-compliant room identification there is an operational and safety requirement, not decoration. Accuracy on paper had to equal accuracy in the field the first time, because there would be no site visit to catch a miss.
02 / Our approach
We built the full interior ADA identification set — room, small-room, stairwell, stair, stair-level, and exit signs — as single-color sub-surface-painted acrylic with raised tactile copy and Grade 2 braille, each type sized per the spec and mapped to the plant's room schedule, from Chlorine Room to Residuals Dewatering to RO Pretreatment. The drawings ran round after round through the engineer's review — submittal SD058, then revised SD058-01, and a marked-up signage schedule — until every sign was approved. For the dedication plaque, the city's logo wasn't in the contract set, so rather than guess we drove RFI 089 to obtain the City of Brandon 'Water Smarter' water-drop mark as production-ready vector art. The finished 24-by-30-inch cast-aluminum plaque carries brushed, clear-coated raised copy and border on a stippled black field, with the city's water drop painted to a single pinned formula — Sherwin-Williams SW6966 'Blueblood' — so a municipality's brand reads identically in cast metal as it does on screen.
Drawings, not the drive.
The memorable thing about Brandon isn't a signature sign — it's that we delivered an entire municipal signage program for a plant we never visited, two hundred miles away, governed start to finish by the engineer's paper trail. When the dedication plaque's city logo wasn't in the drawings, we didn't approximate it; we raised an RFI, got the real vector art, and pinned the water-drop blue to a single named paint chip so a city's brand would render exactly right in cast metal. Out-of-state precision, achieved on paper and verified before a single sign was cut.
- Every sign approved through engineered submittals before fabrication
- Room messaging mapped to the plant schedule, not guessed
- RFI raised to obtain the real city logo rather than approximate it
- Municipal brand color locked to a formula, not a screen render
Scope & features
- Complete Section 10 14 00 signage scope for a municipal water-treatment expansion
- Full interior ADA program across two buildings and multiple levels
- Six coordinated sign types — room, small-room, stairwell, stair, stair-level, exit
- Single-color sub-surface-painted acrylic with raised copy and Grade 2 braille
- Room messaging mapped to the engineer's plant schedule, sign by sign
- Multi-year engineered submittal loop — SD058 to revised SD058-01, formal AE2S review
- Client-initiated RFI to secure the city logo as production-ready vector art
- 24"×30" cast-aluminum dedication plaque, brushed raised copy on a stippled black field
- City "Water Smarter" water-drop logo painted to a pinned color — SW6966 "Blueblood"
- Entire program fabricated in Minnesota and shipped to South Dakota — no site visit
- One-year limited workmanship warranty on every sign and the plaque
Materials
- Single-color sub-surface-painted acrylic
- Raised tactile copy · Grade 2 braille
- Cast aluminum plaque · brushed raised copy
- Stippled black-painted field
- SW6966 "Blueblood" logo match
- VHB tape · blind stud mounting
