New Davidson County Sheriff's Office headquarters to open soon after years-long wait
Natalie Neysa Alund
Four mayors and nearly seven years later, the long-awaited new Davidson County Sheriff's Office headquarters in East Nashville is nearing completion.
Sheriff Daron Hall, whose office employs 1,000, told The Tennessean that staff members are expected to move in to the new headquarters at 710 South Fifth St. by early summer.
Former Mayor Karl Dean announced plans to relocate the Sheriff's Office in 2015. The project was approved in 2016 during former Mayor Megan Barry's administration. The site was chosen by an outside architecture firm that recommended the East Nashville location over 11 others.
It was approved the same year as the new Metro Nashville Police Department headquarters. In February 2019, MNPD's new headquarters opened at 600 Murfreesboro Pike, replacing the old headquarters at 200 James Robertson Parkway.
The law enforcement duties of the sheriff's office include managing county jails as well as processing and serving civil warrants. Currently the agency, mostly consisting of jail corrections officers, is spread out across five buildings in the county.
"In our world, we've never been able to consolidate. We don't have a home," Hall said as he toured the new facility earlier this month, the sun beaming through the windows of his new office on the building's fourth floor.
In addition to maintaining jails, the agency serves nearly 200,000 civil warrants a year including evictions. Those processors, among scores of other employees, will be among just over 200 employees working in the new 76,000-square-foot facility slated to be finished by late May.
The building is being built on property that has belonged to the sheriff's office for a century, Hall said.
Designed by architect ESA and contracted by Bell Construction, the new four-floor facility cost $32.5 million. Motorists traveling along Interstate 24 have a clear shot of the modern building located near the James A. Cayce Homes public housing community.
The site will not house jail inmates but is for operational, administrative, training and other functions. The Jerry Newson Center, which housed the warrants, records and training divisions, was razed in 2018 to make way for the new offices as well as hundreds of parking spaces for employees and visitors.
The former building, which also was an old workhouse for inmates, was named after the Davidson County deputy fatally shot about 26 years ago attempting to serve an eviction notice on Briggs Avenue.
The sheriff's office, with the jail below it, used to be housed at 506 Second Ave. N. until a tornado destroyed it last year, sheriff's spokeswoman Karla West said.
Since then, the office has been in a temporary space at 610 Due West Ave. — where they pay $600,000 a year to lease the space.
"We've never lived together," Hall said. "We're going from 40 people we live and work with every day to 200."
Initially they planned to move to Harding Place in southeast Nashville, but Hall said the Metro Council voted against it because it didn't want to move the jail. The new Downtown Detention Center at 200 James Robertson Parkway opened in May 2020.
The first floor of the new sheriff's office headquarters includes rooms for storage and records as well as a gym and mat room complete with a mock cell for training scenarios for deputies who work at the jail.
Internal affairs interview rooms are also housed on the first floor.
The building's main entrance and reception is one floor up. Also on that floor are training rooms and an auditorium. Currently, Hall said, the office rents churches and other buildings to host graduations and training.
The third floor includes offices for human resources, investigations and IT as well as space to house the citizen academy program, which has been on the lam since the pandemic began.
The top floor houses executive staff including the sheriff's office and his communications staff.
Natalie Neysa Alund is based in Nashville at The Tennessean and covers breaking news across the South for the USA TODAY Network. Reach her at nalund@tennessean.com and follow her on Twitter @nataliealund.