The new home for the Warren County Sheriff’s Office is getting closer to completion as Warren Fiscal Court approved in a special meeting last week a more than $2 million bid to complete renovation work on Sugar Maple Square.

Locally-based Sunbelt Construction, Inc. will handle the $2,289,051 project. Sheriff Brett Hightower told the Daily News the project will transform what is now open space into an area set up for his department’s day-to-day operations.

“If you say something on one side, it’s going to be heard on the other side,” he said of the current space where offices and interview rooms will soon be built.

Collecting “taxes, doing vehicle inspections, carrying concealed, all that is going to be much more efficient here,” he said.

The Sugar Maple strip mall was purchased by the county in 2021 for $1.4 million. Last December, the county accepted a roughly $104,000 bid from Bowling Green-based DRF (Design, Realize and Furnish) Architects who provided design and engineering work for a remodel of the building.

The Sheriff’s Office has already moved its Criminal Investigations Department into the 56,848 square foot building.

As Warren County continues to grow, so does the need for more space for the Sheriff’s Office. Many of the department’s operations are still housed in the Warren County Courthouse, a building constructed over a century and a half ago in 1867.

“Every 160 years, I think it’s a good idea to kind of upgrade and improve facility locations,” Hightower said. “Warren County has probably grown a little bit in population since then – we can’t conduct business the way we did in 1867, or 1967, or 2007.”

For Hightower, a big need is expanded evidence storage.

“We just have more going on here in Warren County,” he said. “We have more deputies and unfortunately, there’s more cases, and with that comes more evidence … We have to have a more efficient way to manage and store this evidence for criminal prosecution.”

Along with office space and storage, Hightower said the remodel will see an area for dispatch and space to handle electronic information for cases.

Areas will also be created for the department’s virtual reality training and for building entry training, Hightower said.

The area of Sugar Maple that once housed a Houchens grocery store will be finished first, the Sheriff said. Once finished, the department’s detectives, patrol personnel, therapists and training and patrol commanders will move in.

Renovations will then be for the new business office, dispatch center, and Hightower’s office.

Hightower estimates all operations will be up and running at Sugar Maple by the start of 2026.