Movement expected with transportation center renovation

The Lorain County commissioners announced work will be kicked into high gear on the final leg of the Intermodal Transportation Center renovation in Elyria.

The long-standing project would see the Lorain County Transportation Center, 40 East Ave., renovated to allow stops by passenger Amtrak trains.

County Administrator James Cordes said in the commissioners’ Jan. 17 meeting that the project, which had seemed to stall in 2017, had not died.

“(The project) was always there, but we had urgency elsewhere that we turned our attention to,” he said.

Cordes said while the commissioners’ attention was turned elsewhere, the transportation center project had “inched along on its own.” He said that funding sources for the project had become “very exhausted” and the county was in danger of losing out on funding if they did not act.

“Back in November the decision was made to blow some life into that and get the sails fully moving and get the ship to leave the port,” he said.

According to Cordes, the county has put out for bids for professional assistance with the project because it is outside of the county’s realm of expertise.

“We’ve put up buildings, we’ve renovated buildings, we’ve done hundreds of millions of dollars worth of work with certain projects, but being up on the tracks, on the platforms, it’s a specialized kind of work,” he said.

Cordes said the county has already contracted with the architects and he hopes that in the next three weeks bids will go out for concrete. He said the county is going to use as much prefabricated concrete as they can for the project so as not to interfere with the trains which will continue to run throughout construction.

The county has been discussing expanding rail operations at the transportation center for quite some time; having been offered $2.9 million from Amtrak to complete the transformation to a passenger rail stop in 2013.

At that time, Joe McHugh, then vice president of government affairs and corporate communications for Amtrak, wrote a letter to the commissioners asking them to work with the train company to bring service to the center instead of the current stop at the River Street station.

Cordes said there are a lot of logistics that still need to be worked out with the construction schedule because the facility is often rented out for events.

“Nobody wants to have their wedding in that area and be walking through a construction site,” he said.

In other news, the commissioners unanimously approved putting a 1.6875mill, five-year renewal levy on a future ballot to fund the Department of Developmental Disabilities after a brief presentation by Superintendent Dr. Amber Fisher. The department is mainly known as the Murray Ridge Center and provides services to about 2,000 residents of the county.

She said the levy is critically important to those the department serves in the county.