Razing, upgrades part of county’s real estate spree
YOUR MONEY /
LANCASTER — Now that the new Fairfield County jail is open, county officials are moving to put the former sheriff’s office and jail space in downtown Lancaster to other use.
County commissioners voted recently to apply for approval from the Historic Lancaster Commission to demolish the 51-year-old jail and sheriff’s office at 221 E. Main St. Plans call for using the lot for parking. The city commission’s approval is required because the site is located in the city’s historic district.
The commissioners plan to preserve and improve a 19th-century brick building at 108 N. High St. on the corner of East Main Street that had housed the sheriff’s detectives bureau and other administrative offices until everything was consolidated at the $35 million jail and sheriff’s office that opened recently at 345 Lincoln Ave.
Plans call for spending an estimated $2 million, and include gutting the interior and upgrading the mechanical and electrical systems to modern standards. The building will house the county auditor’s real-estate assessment office, including large work stations for its geographical information and mapping systems professionals, and conference rooms for Board of Revision meetings and hearings, said county Administrator Carri Brown. The three-member board considers property owner challenges to auditor-set appraisals.
Aesthetics and historic preservation dictate why the brick building, as well as the historic Amstutz Building at 227 E. Main St., a former doctor’s office that the county Job and Family Services agency has converted to a homelike setting for family visitations, are worth saving and reusing for county office space, Commissioner Steve Davis said.
The jail, a plain-looking structure built in 1966 with 3-foot-thick walls, inmate cells and administrative offices once used by the sheriff, lacks any historic “romance,” and would be difficult to reuse, Davis said.
County officials have been on a building spree in general, buying and adapting buildings for county use. It’s not a sign, however, that county government is expanding in the growing county of about 152,000 residents, Davis said.
“This moving around, I would not ascribe it to population growth or the growth of county government. It’s an upgrade to our facilities planning, and quite long overdue,” he said.
The county commissioners also:
Paid Gannett GP Media Inc. $450,000 this year for the Lancaster EagleGazette newspaper building at 138 W. Chestnut St. The county plans to use the building as a records storage center.
Bought a building at 240 Baldwin Dr. for $490,000, and plan to use it for office space for the Emergency Management Agency, the multicounty Major Crimes Unit, the coroner and the facilities manager.
The commissioners also plan to build at the Baldwin site an equipment-storage garage to house the EMA’s mobile command center and other county vehicles. The project is estimated to cost no more than $720,000. The new garage will replace the county’s current maintenance garage at an old car dealership on Lincoln Avenue. County officials said the current garage has structural problems and will be demolished.
Plan to buy for $135,000 and raze a building at 329 Lincoln Ave. that housed a concrete business.
The cleared land bordering the new jail will become green space, enhancing the appearance of Lincoln Avenue, commissioners said.
“We remain concerned about the overall appearance of that block,” Davis said. “To have old, crappy buildings surrounding (the new jail) is not our plan.”