YOUNGSTOWN — With most city council members objecting to spending $3 million in American Rescue Plan funds to hire an architect for a potential safety campus, the administration convinced them to a scaled-down $1.5 million project.

Council voted 7-0 Tuesday on the reduced plan that allows the city to hire a design firm to do preliminary work that might end up being a new police station rather than a combined police-main firehouse project.

After the vote, Mayor Jamael Tito Brown said, “We get a chance to move forward and look at different scenarios. At the end of the day, all I want is to make sure we give our police and fire the tools and technology they need. I’m excited about the opportunities there. We’ll come back to council and get them involved in it and see what happens from there.

“I can’t answer some of the questions council has, the specifics they have. An architect can tell the cost, and we’re going to look at all options.”

The initial plan unveiled in December by the administration called for a $45 million, 138,000-square-foot police station-main fire house at the former Wick Six location, where a group of new car dealerships used to be located until the 1980s.

The location on Wick Avenue on the North Side, the cost and the initial ask of $15 million from the city’s ARP fund to help pay for it met with much resistance from council members.

Also, council slow walked an administration request for $3 million for an architectural firm to design the building by refusing to approve it at Feb. 21 and March 6 meetings.

With the proposal set for a final reading today, the administration offered to reduce the ARP request from $3 million to $1.5 million, saying it would explore the option of leaving the main fire station downtown and significantly reducing the cost of the project.

Instead of $45 million, the project could possibly cost $20 million, according to an administration proposal.

“We don’t know the cost,” Brown said. “We had one architect with a joint building and the topography of that location may have been why it was high. If we separate them (and don’t move the fire station), it may not be an issue. We’ll figure out what happens from here.”

Shasho said the $1.5 million would cover preliminary design work with options for the project and after council and the administration decides on what would be built and the location, further design work would commence.

A complete design would take about eight to 10 months while this partial design would take much less time, Shasho said.

Despite objections from some council members to the location on the North Side, the administration says it is the best spot for the safety campus because the city owns it and has used about $750,000, mostly in grants, to clean it up for development.

Also, the administration’s proposal today states police don’t dispatch from a station like a fire department, and several communities, specifically mentioning Cleveland Heights, relocated police stations out of downtown areas to allow for better parking and better community engagement.

Councilwoman Anita Davis, D-6th Ward, who strongly opposes the North Side location, said the city could demolish the current police station, which is downtown and attached to city hall, and build a new facility there.

Brown said the expense of demolishing the police station and building new there may be more than going to Wick Avenue.

“You’re talking about demoing a building that may have other issues that we don’t know about,” he said. “I don’t want to leave this room thinking that’s an easier fix. Just understand that may be a higher cost with demo involved in it. That’s one concept. When we get the concepts back, there may be multiple scenarios and there may be multiple prices.”

Davis said, “We’re going to be demoing the police station no matter what,” and the city will have to pay the cost of cleaning the structure of any hazardous materials.

With the $1.5 million design work for the safety campus, city council has allocated all but about $6.5 million of its $87.8 million ARP allocation. The city has spent about $16 million of it so far.

If council is to give any more ARP money for the safety campus, it would almost certainly have to reallocate some of those funds.

Brown previously has mentioned reallocating a portion of the $10.5 million for parks and recreation projects and $2 million for property acquisition to permit the city to buy land for business development and to help rebuild neighborhoods.

The city has to appropriate its ARP funds by the end of this year and spend all of it by the end of 2026.

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