MOUNT VERNON — Michael Hajjar, of My EZ Auto Broker, purchased the former Mount Vernon City Schools bus garage at 920 Harcourt Road on March 1, with plans to move the car dealership to the location this fall.
In addition to owning My EZ Auto Broker, currently located at 8868 Columbus Road, Hajjar owns the café Everlasting Cup on South Main Street.
Regarding upcoming renovations at the Harcourt Road property, Hajjar said he wanted to bring the property up to current business standards.
“And just meet, or exceed, community standards for the exterior of the building and the interior,” he added.
Mount Vernon City Schools had used the property before building a new bus garage through the Education Gateway, which also included the Energy Fieldhouse and Yellow Jacket Drive extension. The school district is required to sell properties at a public auction, and the bus garage auction took place at the end of 2021.
“We had quite a few people at the auction,” Mount Vernon Supt. Bill Seder said. “I think over 30 bidders.”
The property sold for $435,000. While the school board has yet to determine exactly how the funds will be used, Seder said they will likely go toward some type of facility improvements.
“As a board, we’ve talked about using some of those proceeds to really help us with our master facility planning for the district,” Seder said.
District facility planning will be discussed at an upcoming special meeting of the school board at 8:30 a.m. March 12 at the district’s central office.
“We’re having an architect firm come in and share with us a master facility planning process and kind of what all is involved with that,” Seder said of the special meeting.
“From assessments, to community stakeholder meetings, to educational visioning, you know, looking at our current facilities, projecting what we might need moving forward — all that kind of is neat in the fact that it adjoins to new information regarding Intel coming to the area,” he said.
“So, it feels like the right time to really get back in and look at the district’s facilities.”
The recent Harcourt Road property sale and upcoming facility planning are intertwined.
“If the board likes what they hear about the master facility planning from this particular firm, then some of those proceeds might go towards hiring them to really help us conduct what could be a year long kind of a process of developing options for the district as we look at our facilities moving forward,” Seder said.
