Credit: Nick Graham
Credit: Nick Graham
The new 37,000-square-foot shared building on the Princeton Road campus where the Board of Elections lives is estimated to cost $35.3 million. The commissioners last week approved eight construction contracts totaling nearly $7.4 million, plus contingency costs.
In all, 19 contractors bid the various pieces — outside walls, roof, electrical and more — in Phase II of the project and the highest bids totaled $9 million.
The county hired Turner Construction for $900,000 last year to manage the project and paid $2.97 million for the first phase of the project to prepare the site for construction. County Administrator Judi Boyko said so far “the bids and the awards came back consistent with what we budgeted through those two phases so right now everything appears to be on budget.”
Work will begin soon on this phase of the project, the final phase of the project includes internal wiring, furnishings, fixtures, landscaping and other finishing work.
Since county Coroner Dr. Lisa Mannix can’t move into the new complex until it is complete in the summer of 2027, the commissioners also approved a new two-year lease — at a cost of $62,865 annually — for the warehouse that currently houses the morgue.
The plan
The new complex is part of the decade-long master plan to consolidate county-owned facilities and make things more convenient for taxpayers. The main hub for county government is the Government Services Center in downtown Hamilton but there are 19 other separate buildings for all county operations.
Part of the space reutilization plan was to empty and jettison the old Administration Center at 130 High St., moving the county auditor and recorder’s office into the Government Services Center and the development and water and sewer departments to the former Developmental Disabilities Board adult daycare center on Liberty-Fairfield Road and Ohio 4.
Part 2 of that plan has moved forward with approval of a $1.8 million contract with Triton Services, Inc. for renovation work on the Liberty-Fairfield Road building.
Boyko said the building’s “bones are excellent,” they just need to reconfigure the inside to accommodate the new office use.
The health district — which owns its own building that some say is inadequate — was supposed to move to the Liberty-Fairfield location too but declined, in-part because of some lost grants that impacted their service expansion plans, according to Health Commissioner Erik Balster.
“There’s been a number grants and other things cut in the public health world that made us kind of rethink some financial things with regard to the scope of some of the services we have,” he said and later added, “I would still say that that space would have been great for us, but I think our board had some hesitation.”
Moving County Auditor Nancy Nix and Recorder Danny Crank to the GSC is on a temporary hold. When Nix saw the space they had planned for her, she deemed it inadequate.
She told the Journal-News she still believes her offices should be co-located with the recorder and treasurer, but if they move into the cramped quarters on the 8th floor it won’t meet their needs. She said they’ll go from nine private offices to two and insufficient areas for all of her specialized needs, like privacy for employees in charge of payroll and benefits and her appraisers have four large monitors on their desks, to name a few.
“I would like to be in that building for cohesion, it makes sense, I personally want to be there,” she said. “However I cannot get my staff, not even one to be incentivized to go, due to condensed space and parking considerations. They just don’t see any upside.”
Commissioner Don Dixon said the new tentative plan is to move some of the social services offices out of the GSC into the Administration Building — after they do some updates to the building — to free up space for Crank and Nix.
A couple projects that weren’t on the original radar have actually already been accomplished. OhioMeansJobs moved from Fairfield into the new Advanced Manufacturing Workforce and Innovation Hub in Hamilton in December and the Area I and II courts are moving out of Oxford and the Historic Courthouse into the former Hamilton Municipal Court space in March.
The commissioners have been socking $15 million a year into the Capital Reserve Fund for a few years to fund this project and it had a balance of $42.3 million last fall.
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