No official decisions have been made concerning the future use of six structures currently standing on the campus of the former Ohio Valley Medical Center.
According to Wheeling City Manager Bob Herron, three undisclosed entities continue to investigate possible uses for several of the vacated buildings, but he said no additional updates are available at this time.
“I have no comment on the OVMC campus right now because nothing has changed since the last update,” the city manager said. “This process has not taken longer than I expected. It’s a big property.”
The six available buildings include the West Tower, the Education and Administration Building, the East Building, the two sections of the Nurse’s Residence, the South Tower, and the structure once home to Hillcrest Behavioral and Northwood. Those structures offer as much as 80,000 square feet.
The former Valley Professional Center, across Chapline Street from the main campus, currently is being renovated for a new headquarters for the Wheeling Police Department. The $6.57 million project on the 30,000-square-foot, three-story building is expected to be completed by August 2022. The building will replace the 4,600-square-foot space the police department has had inside the Ohio County Courthouse for more than four decades.
“That project is planned as a one-year project,” Herron confirmed. “Delays are always possible for whatever reason because there is a lot of work that needs to be completed.”
A New or Old Purpose?
While Herron and members of the City Council have not decided which direction to take with any of the six structures, decisions have been made as temperatures continue to decline in the tri-state region.
In other words, some of the six will be heated while others will not.
“Right now, we are consolidating the uses of the buildings, and we’re not going to heat the West Tower because there’s no one in that building,” Herron explained. “And we’re not going to heat the South Tower because currently we have one tenant in there and they are going to move into the Education and Activities Building for the winter.
“It is very expensive to heat all of the buildings, so we are planning to bring the people on campus into the E&A Building and the behavioral health building,” he said. “There’s a lot of square footage on that campus, so there’s a lot of space to work with there. It’s very complicated.”
City Council voted to acquire the campus in June 2020, and since then a plethora of tours have been conducted by Kurt Zende, the city’s economic development specialist. At one point earlier this year, officials with Bluefield State College proposed a satellite campus for an engineering curriculum, but after representatives of West Liberty University, West Virginia Northern Community College, and Wheeling University spoke against it, the city rejected the idea.
Members of social media from the Upper Ohio Valley have their own ideas about what the future should hold for the former OVMC campus. and the most common answer was “a hospital like it was.”
Some suggestions were much more specific like a drug treatment facility or a state-operated mental health inpatient hospital, or a children’s hospital, or maybe a veterans hospital, or a research center.
And some of the 33 Facebook members who responded to the inquiry offered out-of-the-box ideas like a dirt track, a Mega Dollar General, a homeless shelter, or a new housing complex. But those suggestions would necessitate demolition, and that’s one option never mentioned before.
Is there a chance a razing of the campus could take place?
“There’s always the chance of everything,” Herron said. “It could be part of it, all of it, or none of it. Beyond that, I cannot comment on anything further than to say that anything is possible.”
