Mishawaka City Hall moves to newly renovated location
MISHAWAKA, Ind. --- Twenty million dollars and 100,000 square feet to work with has turned what used to be a ‘fortress looking call center’ into an efficient, spacious, and advanced city hub in the heart of downtown Mishawaka.
“After a couple years of planning and design and construction, we’re moving in,” Mayor Dave Wood of Mishawaka says with excitement.
Three of Mishawaka’s main government offices, including Mayor Dave Wood’s, are officially moving into their new home downtown.
“This is what I call the corner of Main Street and Main Street, right downtown Mishawaka,” says Mayor Wood. “It is the central corner in our city.”
The building, located at 100 Lincolnway West, will serve as a central hub for City Hall, along with the Police Department and Mishawaka Utilities. The expansion allows for advanced technological enhancements and forward-thinking improvements.
“This is the very first building that we have had that has technology built into it. We have servers now in purpose-built server rooms,” Mayor Wood says. “We also have a command center, so any kind of natural disaster that we see in the city; could be major, could be a blizzard, could be a man-made disaster. We have the ability to control, run scenes from the building, a very new capability for us.”
The majority of the upgrades are being made at the Police Department, which Mayor Wood hopes will be attractive to potential recruits and help solve a problem facing law enforcement agencies across the state.
“Every community in the state of Indiana is looking to attract police officers and can’t find them,” Mayor Wood explains. “Any police officer who wants to come in here and look at the facilities we have here including our gym space, fitness room, our locker room facilities, and just the overall openness and collaborative spaces we have, we think they will find it a very attractive place to work and will give us the advantage when trying to hire police officers.”
While the new City Hall gives a modern and advanced touch to downtown Mishawaka, Mayor Wood says it will still bring a small-town feel with it’s openness to citizens.
“While Mishawaka is growing, and we project to grow even more in the future, we still want to kind of maintain that small town feel when we’re offering our services,” explains Mayor Wood. “We want one-stop shopping, we want face-to-face interaction between our citizens and our staff, and we don’t want there to be a fortress- type of feel when you enter into our citizen’s building here.”
An open-house for the public will be held for on October 27th from 4-7 P.M.