Overland Park City Hall near Antioch Road and Santa Fe Drive has long served as the primary hub for city business.

But within the next decade, city operations will move to a new city hall space closer to the heart of Overland Park on College Boulevard, leaving the 1960s-era building empty.

What will eventually become of the old city hall and Myron Scafe building across the street — which is home to additional city offices and serves as a police station for the northern part of the city — remains largely up in the air at this time.

A corridor study on 87th Street backed by a Planning Sustainable Places grant from the Mid-America Regional Council could help lay the groundwork for the old city hall and Scafe’s future.

Even so, an actual concrete decision about what to do with the building is probably still a few years off.

Questions about old city hall, Scafe makes for some uncertainty

To put it frankly, the future of both Overland Park City Hall and the Scafe building is unclear.

“We don’t know what we’re going to do with either of the buildings right now,” said Tony Rome, facilities director for Overland Park, during the October Public Safety Committee meeting.

At the time, the committee was considering a lease extension for the Overland Park Crisis Action Team, the police department’s mental health behavioral unit. That unit has worked out of a space at a private office building since it was first established about five years ago.

That was meant to be a temporary arrangement while the city planned to build a Police Training Facility at the W. Jack Sanders Justice Center. Once that building opens, other divisions are expected to relocate their operations to that campus, freeing up space at Scafe for OPCAT.

But since it’s unclear what will happen to the Scafe building and where the other police department employees who work there might end up, city officials decided not to move the OPCAT unit at this time. Instead, they’ll continue to operate out of their current leased space, which is near Scafe.

“Rather than move forward with the plan to move them to the basement of a building that is uncertain, [Police Chief Doreen Jokerst] and I decided to hit the pause button on that,” Rome said. “There is a lot of moving pieces in that process, and so we’re going to really evaluate what we’re going to do with these two buildings.”

How does the MARC 87th Street Corridor grant come into play?

Overland Park got just shy of $100,000 from MARC’s Planning Sustainable Places grant program for the 87th Street Corridor Study. It will focus on the roughly one-and-a-quarter-mile distance from the city’s western limits to Antioch Road (where 87th Street becomes Santa Fe).

It will also touch on the soon-to-be-former city hall building, said Erin Ollig, Overland Park’s strategic planning manager, during a discussion about the then-pending grant application at a May Community Development Committee meeting.

“Particularly with the potential redevelopment of this area with the new city hall moving, we thought this would be a good time to look at this area,” she said.

However, it likely won’t be the last word on what to do with either building after the new Overland Park City Hall is fully operational in 2034.

“We’re not expecting it to be the focus or to make a final recommendation for the building’s future,” city spokesperson Meg Ralph told the Post of the grant.

Ralph said the main goal of the corridor study is to look at multimodal transportation options, which could include transit, pedestrian traffic and bicycle access. However, she said land use will also be examined.

“We did include the current City Hall site in our grant application as part of the consideration, but it’s not the focus,” Ralph said.

In the past, Overland Park has used grants from MARC’s Planning Sustainable Places program to guide decisions on multiple priorities and “inform next steps,” Ollig said in May.

Take, for instance, the downtown area now known as Clock Tower Landing. Planning for all of that began in earnest with a 2017 Planning Sustainable Places grant focused on the Overland Park Farmers’ Market as an entertainment and transportation hub.

More recently, Overland Park conducted a study around the 79th Street corridor in 2023 and adopted an aspirational plan in 2024 that has now set up long-term planning to make the area more pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly.

Overland Park also used MARC’s Planning Sustainable Places grant program to create a Downtown Parking Plan in 2013, a Vision Metcalf addition in 2017 and the College/Metcalf Walkability Study in 2021, among others.

More thorough analysis on city hall, Scafe is likely down the line

Rome, earlier this month, said the city does plan to do a more thorough look at the future of city hall and Scafe in the next few years, though exactly when that will happen is unsure.

He predicted that it would likely happen in 2029 or 2030, though that was a forecast.

In the meantime, the current city hall, the Scafe building and the various other buildings that house city offices will continue to operate as they have while the city waits for preexisting leases at the future Overland Park City Hall to run out.

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