The Salem City Council will have a month to month lease drawn up for Mission Salem and Sleep in Heavenly Peace to utilize the former Save-a-Lot building on West Main Street until the city is ready to move forward on converting the building into a new police station.
Both groups have recently lost buildings where they stored materials and made items for families in need.
The President of Mission Salem Angie Courtright explains their use of the building.
“We’ll get in there and start cleaning up a few things. It’s emptry for the most part, but there are some partitions that need to come down, floor needs cleaned up and stripped. Our volunteers will do all that and then we’ll be moving in our own supplies. And we will start right away using it for our monthly builds and we’ll probably meet their once a month for our board meeting.”
Courtright says under the agreement they would also install an overhead garage door entrance. She says the larger space may allow for more projects to be completed.
“Definitely will make it more convenient. One of the big things we ran into one of the last two years with COVID is for a long time we had a lumber shortage. So getting treated lumber was very difficult. So when we would run into batches of it, we would buy it in bulk and then we had a storage issue. So this will definitely help with that, it would just make it more efficient. Right now we’ve got stuff stored in a few different locations and none of it is in town.”
Courtright says after touring the building, they contacted Sleep in Heavenly Peace about using it as well since they had also lost their work and storage location.
City Manager Rex Barbee says all the work being completed will be useful for when the city is ready to move forward with the next renovation for the police department.
“It’s our belief that every dollar that we can save them goes back into the community, so thats one more reason for us to provide the space.”
Barbee anticipates the conversion to the police station is still a couple of years away.
