After facing another delay earlier this year, Gahanna’s $59 million civic center is set to finally open in August.
The city announced it will begin Aug. 10 operating out of the building at 825 Tech Center Drive that will hold Gahanna City Hall, Gahanna Division of Police headquarters and the Gahanna Senior Center, and will open to the public later that week. A public dedication is scheduled for Aug. 25, and additional details on the dedication event will be shared later, the city shared on Facebook.
City offices will move into the building starting July 27, Kevin Schultz, the city’s senior director of operations, told Gahanna City council on July 6.
City council will host its last meeting at the current city hall, 200 S. Hamilton Road, on Aug. 17, and its first meeting at Tech Center Drive will be Sept. 8. Senior activities will likely start the week of Aug. 24, Schultz said.
Construction started in May 2024 to transform the former three-story office building into the new home for Gahanna City Hall, Gahanna Division of Police headquarters and the Gahanna Senior Center. Those three are all currently located in three separate buildings on a 5-acre, city-owned site at Hamilton Road and Rocky Fork Boulevard.
When the project started, it had an expected completion date in November 2025. That got pushed to April, but was delayed until the summer because of a previous subcontractor’s faulty electrical work, Mike Fitzpatrick, CEO of Elford, the main contractor on the project, told council members in May.
The electrical contractor was terminated from the project because of issues with the work, and a new electrical company was brought in to fix the “poor-quality work” of the previous firm, Fitzpatrick said in May.
While the delay has pushed back moving into the new space, Schultz told council members July 6 that the cost of fixing the work was on Elford and not on the city.
“While the city has seen a delay in moving, it has not impacted the budget of this particular project in any way,” he said.
Schultz said city officials are still evaluating what to do with the current city hall, police headquarters and senior center after the move, and they expect to speed up that conversation before the end of the year.
Gahanna bought the nearly 100,000-square-foot Tech Center Drive building for $8.75 million in 2022 to address city facility needs as all three current buildings were tight on space. City officials said in 2022 it would have cost $99 million to build a new facility, This Week News, which was part of the USA TODAY NETWORK, previously reported.
Prior to the city buying the building, it was vacant as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to previous reporting.
The Tech Center Drive building is located on a 7.14-acre site immediately east of AEP Ohio headquarters, and was originally built in 1998 by Daimler, a regional developer, with nearly 100,000 square feet of space, This Week News reported in 2022. The city extensively renovated the building, having gutted it the summer of 2024.
Delaware County and eastern Columbus suburbs reporter Maria DeVito can be reached at mdevito@dispatch.com and @mariadevito13.dispatch.com on Bluesky and @MariaDeVito13 on X.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Gahanna’s $59M civic center to open in August after delays
Reporting by Maria DeVito, Columbus Dispatch / The Columbus Dispatch
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Maria DeVito, Columbus Dispatch | USA TODAY Network
