When the Nashville Youth Campus for Empowerment (NYCE) opens on Brick Church Pike in 2027, the people who walk through it will notice the daylight, the courtyards, and the wood and stone finishes. Very few will think about what's running behind the walls and above the ceilings. That's by design.
NYCE is a 270,000-square-foot juvenile justice campus on 14 acres in north Nashville, built for Metro Nashville and Davidson County by general contractor Bell Construction, with DLR Group and Smith Gee Studio as architects. Lee Company is supporting the project's plumbing and mechanical work. On a facility built to keep kids safe while helping them and their families heal, those systems carry more weight than they do on almost any other building type.
What's Being Built
NYCE replaces Davidson County's juvenile justice facility on Woodland Street, which opened in 1994. The new campus brings courts, youth pre-trial housing, assessment, and family services onto one site. According to Correctional News, it includes a five-story courthouse, a multi-story parking structure, low-rise housing cottages, and a 24-hour Respite and Assessment Center for youth in crisis, placed at the opposite end of the campus from the housing.
Juvenile Court Judge Sheila Calloway, who first pushed for the project in 2016, has described the goal plainly: "What we're going to have here is something more restorative." The design team calls it a trauma-informed campus, with spaces meant to calm rather than retraumatize: large windows, natural materials, residential-style furniture, and visitation areas built for family reunification.
The steel frame topped out in September 2025. The building now moves into the phase where MEP trades carry a large share of the work.
Why Plumbing and Mechanical Work Is Harder Here
A juvenile justice campus isn't an office building with extra locks. The mechanical and plumbing scope has to hit three targets at once: security, life safety, and a setting that doesn't feel like a jail.
Security plumbing. Housing and holding areas in justice facilities typically use tamper-resistant, institutional-grade fixtures, piping that's concealed and protected, and service chases that let maintenance staff work on the system without entering occupied rooms. Every exposed component has to be thought through so it can't be broken, removed, or used to cause harm. That changes how fixtures are specified, how rough-in is laid out, and how tightly the plumbing crew has to coordinate with the wall and ceiling trades.
Mechanical systems for secure spaces. HVAC in secure areas has to deliver comfort and fresh air while using hardened grilles and diffusers, keeping ductwork out of reach, and supporting smoke control and life-safety sequences in a building where occupants can't simply walk out. The campus is also targeting LEED Gold, which raises the bar on equipment efficiency, controls, and commissioning.
Security you don't see. Correctional News reported that the campus will have full security features designed so "you just don't see it or feel it." For MEP trades, that means the protective work has to be built in rather than bolted on. A trauma-informed design only works if the systems behind it are installed right the first time.
A complicated site and schedule. The project has dealt with difficult topography, months of rock blasting, a tight timeline, and construction that started before design was finished. On a multi-building campus with a courthouse, parking deck, housing, and a crisis center, each with different system requirements, that puts real pressure on coordination, sequencing, and the field crews doing the install.
The Skill It Takes
Work like this depends on experienced pipefitters, plumbers, sheet metal workers, and controls technicians who understand institutional work, can read evolving drawings, and can coordinate in tight spaces with other trades. It also depends on supervision that keeps quality consistent across several buildings at once.
Lee Company has been doing large commercial and institutional mechanical and plumbing work across Middle Tennessee for decades. NYCE is a project where that experience shows up in ways the public won't see but the kids, families, and staff inside will rely on every day: water that runs, air that's clean and comfortable, and systems that hold up under institutional use.
What It Takes to Staff a Project Like This
Projects like NYCE also show a challenge every specialty contractor knows: manpower needs move with the schedule. Crew size ramps up fast during rough-in and peaks during installation, and it doesn't stay flat. Many contractors fill those peaks with temporary labor from multiple suppliers.
That's where things get hard to manage. On a secure civic project, every worker on site needs to be ready to work, with the right skills, the right safety training, and whatever site access requirements the owner sets. Superintendents end up chasing timesheets, checking who's qualified, and reconciling invoices from several labor suppliers, while also trying to run the work.
That's the problem Smart Labor Management (SLM) solves. SLM is a managed service provider (MSP) and vendor management system (VMS) built for construction. We help specialty contractors like Lee Company run their temporary labor programs through one place: managing labor suppliers, tracking worker compliance and readiness, handling timekeeping, reconciling invoices, and giving project and operations leaders clear visibility into temp labor costs across jobs. The result is less admin on the superintendent and better accountability from suppliers.
The Takeaway
NYCE will change how Nashville serves young people and their families. Getting there takes skilled trade work that most people will never see. When the doors open in 2027, the safety, security, and comfort built into this campus will come down to crews installing it right, one system at a time.
If your team is managing temp labor across complex projects like this one, talk to SLM about how we help specialty contractors take control of their temp labor programs.