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Move-In Day Nearing at New Wheeling Police Headquarters

By ERIC AYRES 6 min read

WHEELING - Members of the Wheeling Police Department are expected to begin moving into their new headquarters as early as this week, as work on the $6.5 million renovation of a three-story building on the former Ohio Valley Medical Center campus is wrapping up.

Ground was broken in September 2021 on the project, for which the general contract was awarded to the Waller Corporation of Washington, Pensylvania. Originally slated to be completed last fall, the project hit some snags along the road - most notably supply chain issues that caused delays.

During the most recent meeting of Wheeling City Council, City Manager Robert Herron reported that the last major supply chain hurdle - delivery of dozens of doors for the facility - is presently being overcome. Last week, 56 doors were delivered and were being hung by crews on site wrapping up loose ends. This week, another 58 doors are slated to be delivered.

"Ballistic glass for the lobby is currently on back order," Herron noted, explaining that the public entrance area will not be open until this last component is in place. "Once that is finished, it will be open to the public."

City officials said a public open house of the new facility is expected to take place in the three or four weeks after the lobby is finished and the department is settled in and ready to showcase its new home base.

Until then, the police department is not wasting any time when it comes to moving out of the cramped and outdated 4,500-square-foot facility in the City-County Building downtown to the new, state-of-the-art, 30,000-square-foot headquarters in Center Wheeling.

"I just sent out an email after a meeting that took place today about the transition down here," Wheeling Police Chief Shawn Schwertfeger said Friday, noting that members of the force have been eager to check out the new facility in anticipation of finally getting into the new workspace.

"It makes me feel good to see young officers and supervisors kind of coming down here and walking around," Schwertfeger said. "They’re very excited."

Current members of the Wheeling Police Department are not the only ones who have been impressed with the new headquarters. Some of the completed facilities - including conference rooms - have already been utilized, and some law enforcement officials visiting from out of town have had an opportunity to see all the new space has to offer.

"I’ve given a few tours, unofficially," Schwertfeger said. "The feedback internally and externally so far has been astronomical. For example, I hosted the West Virginia Chiefs of Police Association board meeting a week before last and walked police chiefs from all around the state through the building. There were a lot of envious police chiefs."

The new Wheeling Police Department Headquarters not only has much more space than the current department (which has been used since 1959), it has an array of 21st-century features that will catapult the force out of an antiquated "broom closet" into a cutting-edge complex designed specifically for modern law enforcement operations.

In the current department downtown, there are no women's restrooms, no adequate meeting rooms, insufficient evidence storage spaces, no dedicated lunch room and a significant lack of modern accommodations in a space that the chief indicated the department outgrew decades ago.

"When I was hired as the chief of police, Mr. Herron actually didn't show me the police department until after I took the job," Schwertfeger noted with a laugh.

A Northern Panhandle native, Schwertfeger came back to the area in 2012 after ascending the law enforcement ladder in Albemarle County, Virginia, where he also saw that department shift from a small, outdated facility into a much larger, modernized facility.

"I went through a very similar transition in Virginia," he said. It wasn’t as bad as where we’re at now, but it was the same kind of concept. We went from a county office building that didn’t have enough space for our size. We moved into a 48,000- to 50,000-square foot facility, and the morale just skyrocketed."

The chief said he knows for a fact what this kind of an improvement can do for a police force.

"My hope is that recruitment and retention will be positively impacted," he said.

The new facility has conference rooms with modern technology, ample evidence rooms systematic chain-of-command and security features, individual lockers for all uniformed and non-uniformed department employees, a large lunch room, a full-sized fitness center, training rooms including simulator rooms, victim advocate offices, prisoner check-in facilities, work spaces for officers and detectives, and much more.

Not only has the cited provided the $6.5 million for the renovations through money generated via the City Service Fee, investments to enhance the new and improved department have also come from a variety of sources. A $1 million earmark from the federal government was used to

"This is no doubt the premier police department in the state of West Virginia - and there are other new ones," Schwertfeger said. "Beckley’s is new, Martinsburg’s is new, and I think a lot of other departments will start trying to follow suit. Hands down, this is the best agency in the state. It's phenomenal."

When construction began on the new police headquarters, the future of the rest of the buildings on the former OVMC campus was still uncertain. Since then, the future has become clear. WVU Medicine is expected to build a multimillion-dollar cancer center on the OVMC site, and the remaining buildings are expected to be torn down.

Another structure that is expected to meet the wrecking ball is the Center Wheeling Parking Garage, which is adjacent to the new police headquarters. The renovations were designed with the parking garage in mind - with entrances on the upper levels of the building and a sally port entrance for prisoner transport, as well.

The sally port portion of the contract was deleted after the garage was closed because of structural issues and plans to raze the structure began moving forward. Herron said the sally port will be added after the garage is torn down, which won't happen until the Wheeling Fire Department Headquarters moves from the lower level of the structure into its new $9 million facility that is expected to be completed in East Wheeling later this year.

Otherwise, despite the supply chain issues and a few snags, the renovation project has gone as planned and is being finished within budget.

"The transformation of this building from a doctors' office building to a police headquarters has gone exactly as we had expected," Herron said. "When we first looked at the building, we felt that this was a perfect fit for a police headquarters before we started construction."

By next month, the official address of the Wheeling Police Department will be 2115 Chapline St.

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