MORGANTOWN — Glenn Adrian of Enrout Properties said his group has set an “aggressive timeline” for construction of a new MECCA 911 facility in the Morgantown Industrial Park.
“The anticipation is by the beginning of the fourth quarter of 2023, we’d have our certificate of occupancy to turn it over to the MECCA 911 to finish the inside and get their equipment in there,” Adrian told members of the Monongalia County Commission.
The commission recently approved a lease agreement with Enrout Properties to that end.
As previously reported, infrastructure like roads and site excavation will be funded through the Harmony Grove TIF District. Construction on that aspect of the project is slated to begin this fall.
From there, the 9,600-square-foot facility will be developed in a similar manner to the Mon County Center in Mylan Park, with Enrout Properties in place of the Mylan Park Foundation.
Enrout will build the 911 center and lease it back to the county at a rate that will cover the cost of the building, plus an additional percentage factored in to cover property taxes in order to make the TIF district whole.
At the end of the 30-year life of the district, the building’s deed will be transferred over to the county.
The finished product would replace the county’s existing 5,000-square-foot MECCA facility, built in 1997 on Mon General Drive.
That building is the home of the county’s emergency dispatch center, as well as the hub for emergency management and homeland security operations.
Due to limited space at that site, however, MECCA has emergency management assets stored at various locations across the county.
“This is a big item. This is something the commission has been working on as long as I can remember; the replacement of our 911 center, which is currently, as everyone knows, landlocked. They can’t expand any. So we’ve been working on this for some time and this really kind of sets everything in motion to make that a reality,” Commissioner Sean Sikora said of the lease agreement.
Working cost estimates put the project at about $9 million, including contingencies.
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