MOUNT VERNON — The City of Mount Vernon announced Thursday that it plans to move its police station to Sychar Road, ending a four-decade run in the Plaza Building downtown.
The move will coincide with the city’s planned occupation and redevelopment of the northeast corner of Public Square, which is expected to take place over the next three to five years.
The municipal court and law director’s office, also housed in the Plaza Building at 5 N. Gay St., will move to a new facility at 3 E. High St. The Plaza Building, which the city has deemed “prohibitively expensive” to maintain, will be demolished.
The police department will move to a new facility at 71 Sychar Rd., a half-mile south of Hiawatha Water Park. It will sit on the 2.5-acre lot that formerly housed Hiawatha School. The city tore down the school once it took possession of the property in 2010, and the lot has remained vacant since.
THE DECISION: The city originally intended to build a new fire station on the property, in an effort to better serve Mount Vernon’s growing east end.
But a 2020 study by the Ohio Fire Chiefs Association determined the best spot for a second station would actually be further east (the study recommended the intersection of Coshocton Avenue and Vernonview Drive).
“They looked at all the fire and EMS calls in the city … and projections for how we would grow, and they realized what we had already suspected, which is that the Sychar Road property was just too close to the downtown fire station,” Safety-Service Director Richard Dzik said.
“We wouldn’t be getting the benefit we’d need out of it.”
Dzik and Mount Vernon Fire Chief Chad Christopher have spent the last two years searching for a more suitable location on the east end of town.
“I’m not prepared to say we’ve made a decision on where it’s going to go,” Dzik said Thursday, “but we have a good idea.”
In the meantime, discussions arose about what to do with the police department, given the deterioration of the Plaza Building and the city’s projected population growth. Mayor Matt Starr said in a press release Thursday that the Sychar Road property seemed like a natural fit.
“This location was chosen based on our projections for future growth,” Starr said, “both the growth of the city as well as, necessarily, the police department along with that.”
The city cited Intel’s planned $20 billion investment in Licking County as a driving factor behind the move.
“We know that as development comes in, and more people live in the city, we’re going to need more police protection,” Dzik said.
The move to Sychar Road will represent a substantial increase in space for the police department.
The department, which currently employs 35 full-time staff members, utilizes 8,134 square feet inside the Plaza Building. A recent study conducted by an outside firm concluded the department would need 20,643 square feet to meet the needs of the future.
Dzik said the city will aim to build a facility this size, or close to it, on the Sychar Road property.
“If we can afford to build it that way, that’s the idea,” said Dzik, noting that architectural plans have yet to be drawn. “We will have to balance the cost of the project with the need.”
The move to Sychar Road will also allow the police department to consolidate all of its assets into one location. For example, the impound lot, currently located on Greenwood Avenue, will be moved there.
NEXT STEPS: It’s unclear what the new police department will look like, or how much it will cost. Dzik said the city will spend 2023 working with architects to design not only the new police department, but also the new courthouse, fire station and city annex.
And while city officials met with vendors to talk about potential building costs a year-and-a-half ago, Dzik said, those figures are likely useless now.
“The cost per square foot for commercial space has gone up since then,” Dzik said. “So we’re not going to have a good estimate on the cost until we get the architectural work done.”
The size of the property will allow the city to plan potential expansion projects down the road, Dzik said, if it can’t afford everything right away.
“This site gives us that flexibility,” he said.
Dzik said the city is currently working on organizational assessments of the police and fire departments, conducted by the Ohio Fire Chiefs Association and the Ohio Association of Chiefs of Police, to determine what resources the MVPD will need moving forward.
Dzik and Police Chief Robert Morgan also recently toured the Genoa Township Police Department, in rapidly-expanding eastern Delaware County, to get a sense of what the MVPD might want, and need, in the years ahead.
“Our vision is to continue to have a large training room, so we can have full-department training when we need to do it. We want to have a small training facility as well, along with workout facilities, administrative offices, locker rooms, and everything you’d find in a traditional police department. …” Dzik said.
“You also can’t have enough meeting rooms. So our goal is to have spaces where officers can get together and talk about projects. There is not a lot of that space (at the current facility).”
The city will likely need to build a pole barn on the property to house the MVPD’s 20-vehicle fleet, Morgan said, as well as a facility to store large evidence.
Dzik said the police department’s move to Sychar Road will occur within the same timeline as the other projects on the northeast corner of Public Square.
“I’ve heard we’re looking to have everything completed, if we can, in the next three-to-five years. And that will depend on things such as money and how the projects progress,” he said. “But something should be happening (on Sychar Road) in three years, and hopefully we can wrap it up mostly in five years.”
Plans call for the demolition of the buildings at 3 E. High St., 16 N. Main St., 4 E. Chestnut St. and 6 E. Chestnut St., which the city bought for a total of $1.7 million this summer, according to records from the Knox County Auditor’s Office.
A new municipal courthouse will be built on the High Street property, and this building will also house the law director’s office. An annex for city offices will be built on the North Main Street and East Chestnut Street properties. City Hall will remain put, as will the parking garage underneath the Plaza Building. The Plaza Building, at the corner of North Gay Street and East Chestnut Street, will be demolished.
Knox Pages has been reporting on this project since May 2022. Here’s a timeline of our coverage:
From May 6: Mount Vernon unveils plans for new municipal court
From May 10: City council approves shoring up Plaza Building parking garage
From May 24: Residents speak out about new courthouse location
From July 26: Residents renew opposition to proposed new municipal court location
A NEW NEIGHBORHOOD: It’s unclear how long Mount Vernon’s police department has been located downtown.
Dzik, in consultation with longtime City Auditor Terry Scott, said the police department was located in City Hall for at least three decades before moving to the Plaza Building in 1986.
Now, the police department will be moving to a new part of town. The area is diverse zoning-wise, with Kno-Ho-Co on one side of the Sychar Road property and a single-family residence on the other. The station will sit half-a-mile from Hiawatha Water Park and two houses down from an apartment complex.
The lot at 71 Sychar Road has always been zoned as “public land,” Dzik explained, as it housed a public school before the city bought it.
Dzik said the city “has not engaged the neighborhood very much” in regards to the decision to move the police station there. He said those conversations are coming.
“We hope this is not going to be too impactful (to the area),” Dzik said. “But our engineer, any time projects like this get toward the start phase, or the conceptual phase, he’s going to engage the community a little bit.”
Dzik added that City Council members were “heavily involved” in deciding where the new police station would go. He said the planning committee determined early on that downtown Mount Vernon would no longer be a viable option.
“The police department needs more space than what was available downtown,” Dzik said.
The city does not anticipate traffic changes on Sychar Road as a result of this decision, Dzik said.
“We make ‘house calls,'” Morgan said in the press release Thursday. “The majority of our officers are out of the office at any given time. We don’t have to be headquartered downtown.”
Sychar Road branches off of Coshocton Avenue and is “pretty well-traveled,” Dzik said. He hopes this will allow the MVPD to remain visible and accessible in the community, despite being located outside of downtown.
“We hope people (will still be able) to find the police department,” Dzik said. “They will be available any time people come in and need anything.”
I personally think that’s a terrible spot for the police station. I worry being someone who lives on sychar that it’s just gonna turn into a a drag strip for police cars speeding down the street. Personally I think it should remain downtown, sychar road is an entirely residential area and is also not an area where police respond to frequently so they’ll be driving across town anyway. Hence why the road will turn into a drag strip. Maybe the police station should’ve taken better care of their building so we don’t have to use our tax dollars to build a new police station in a place we don’t need it with money that could be used better. I have very little faith in our city police force they should focus on the real problems instead of building a shiny new station with my tax dollars.