Thanks to a partnership among the Morrow County Development Authority, the Board of Morrow County Commissioners, and the Morrow County Engineer, the county will get a new engineering facility that will reduce costs, increase efficiency, and pay for itself in 20 years, the Morrow County Sentinel reports. The new garage “will be a roughly 50,000-square-foot facility located on county-owned ground on Home Road by the Morrow County Sheriff’s Office,” and will include “a salt dome, rock storage, fueling station, a community conference room, and a section of the building will house the opportunity to pour precast bridge components in-house.” The county engineer’s “20-year cost estimate in savings by making bridge beams in-house exceeds the cost of the building.” A relatively small number of Ohio counties make their own bridge components in-house; Morrow County Engineer Bart Dennison “feels the county will be better able to tackle the large number of bridges that need replaced” while also realizing a cost savings.
Additionally, the new facility will increase efficiency “by consolidating the two current facilities the engineer road crews operate out of into one central location.” The current operations are housed at the fairgrounds and in a former ODOT building; the fairgrounds truck depot is not heated, “which is tough on the dump trucks in winter.” The new facility “will allow for the trucks to be properly stored” and should increase their longevity, as well as provide space for maintenance technicians to perform work more proficiently. The projected cost of the project is $7.3 million; the Development Authority “issued a bond request for $7.25 million” and worked with County Treasurer Jim Jahn to secure the purchase of the bond with the county. Several additional entities worked with the partnership to make this project a reality, including Morrow County Auditor Conni McChesney, Meeder Investments, the Village of Mount Gilead, and legal counsel to the Development Authority: Bricker Graydon, LLP. For more, read the full article.
