Covington breaks ground on new city hall

Covington broke ground on its new city hall building this week.

“In the last 54 years, our city government has called five different locations home, five city halls in 54 years,” said Mayor Joe Meyer at the groundbreaking on Tuesday. “And it’s been very difficult to describe how this nomadic existence and those poorly equipped buildings have interfered with our ability to provide the top notch quality of service to the residents.”

The building site is in the 600 block of Scott Street, at the former location of the Emergency Shelter of Northern Kentucky and a small park.

Flanking either side of the land is the Kenton County Library branch to the north and the post office to the south. The city released conceptual renderings from firms Brandstetter Carroll, Inc. and Elevar Design Group in October. Pepper Construction will perform the building itself. The city hopes open the building sometime in the summer of 2026.

The project has been in the works for years, and the city convened a citizen task force in 2018 to brainstorm what the new building should accomplish.

“The task force said that Covington needed a new city hall that, amongst other things, was in a visible, accessible, central and prominent location that is both symbolically and physically important to Covington, and that it be not a single-purpose fortress dedicated only to government offices but one with regular community events and programming and a true civic commons with a place for community voice, debate and demonstrations,” Meyer said. “Well, today, some six years later, we break ground on a building that our people will be proud to call home for a long time and that will help Covington create a bigger, better, more exciting future.”

Check out concept renderings of the new building below.