Elyria announces contract, groundbreaking for Public Works Complex

After nearly a decade of discussion and several abortive attempts, Elyria will finally break ground on a new $20 million Public Works Complex next month. At a City Council meeting on Monday, Mayor Kevin Brubaker announced that the city had entered into a contract for the construction of the complex on Garden Street, and that a groundbreaking ceremony would be held at 1 p.m. March 19. Council had voted in June to authorize the mayor to advertise for bids and enter into a contract for the construction of the project, and earlier this month the city entered into an agreement with Rycon Construction Inc. of Cleveland. Brubaker worked for the city in a number of capacities before becoming mayor in 2024, and he said he recalled a need to replace the current maintenance garage going back about a decade. Per the agreement obtained by The Chronicle-Telegram, the city will pay Rycon $20.2 milllion to build the nearly 90,000-square-foot central maintenance garage, which will form the center of the public works complex, as well as two ancillary buildings totaling about 20,000 square feet. One of the additional facilities will be a 10,000-square foot evidence building for the Elyria Police Department, which currently rents space offsite to store evidence. Brubaker said he believed that, at least financially, it was the largest public improvement the city has ever pursued. "That was one of my priorities coming in (as mayor), finding a way to fund this without raising taxes or needing to do anything like that," Brubaker said. "We found the money because we had the bonding capacity to do this." Council voted last year to approve the sale of $21 million in bonds to fund the creation of the complex. At Monday's meeting, Finance Director Ted Pileski said he would begin paying off those bonds in 2026. The city most recently began pursuing plans to replace its existing Central Maintenance Garage, which houses several city departments along with most of Elyria's nonemergency municipal vehicles and equipment, in 2019. At that time the city hired Strollo Architects of Youngstown to design the project, and the city tapped the company again in 2024 to redesign its own plans for a new effort to build the new garage. Assistant Safety Service Director Joe Strohsack has headed the project for the city, but was away Wednesday and unable to comment. Strohsack has said in the past that the current maintenance garage is not large enough to fit all of the vehicles and equipment the city maintains, which leads to city apparatuses being left out in the elements, which reduces their service life. Brubaker said the new facility would alleviate this problem. It not only includes more space, but specially designed maintenance bays for equipment like the city's sanitation trucks. "For the residents, it is all about reducing the costs down the road of replacing equipment," Brubaker said. "Being able to service our vehicles and keep them in dry conditions means we can keep them longer. We have built a really good, solid new fleet over the past seven or eight years through the 2016 half percent income tax, and we want to protect the residents' investment in those vehicles." The main facility will have designated offices and other spaces for employees to gather or work, and the mechanics from the fire department and Water Sanitation will be relocated to the new building to centralize all the city's maintenance work. "This is not a Taj Mahal building," Brubaker said. "It is an effective, economical, well thought out building that is giving our employees what they need, but is not some kind of playground." Rycon has about 550 days to complete the project, and Brubaker said he expects the building to be open and occupied by September 2027. Contact Owen MacMillan at (440) 329-7123 or omacmillan@chroniclet.com.