The county needs many of these separate facilities because there isn’t room in the Government Services Center in downtown Hamilton for everything.
The plan is to empty the old Administration Center at 130 High Street, 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. They will either sell or lease the old Administration Center, officials have said they believe they can fetch $5 million, possibly $6 million for the 35-year-old building.
This week Commissioner Don Dixon said he wants to put the project on hold while they reconnoiter with the other elected officials, namely County Auditor Nancy Nix, who has said the space earmarked for her operation isn’t adequate.
“I’m not in favor of moving forward, drawing any plans and spending any money for architectural review and space studies when we don’t have a commitment that the move is going to happen,” Dixon said. “I think we need to just stop. For people that want to come in our building we’ll make provisions for that but I think we need to discuss this as a board.”
Nix told the Journal-News previously she surveyed other auditors’ offices in the state and Butler is the only one where the auditor, recorder and treasurer – people generally need all three offices when they are transacting business – aren’t housed together.
“I’ve been clamoring for the recorder, the auditor and the treasurer to be together for the last 17 years I’ve been here,” Nix said. “Because you witness taxpayers who come in and you say now you have to go across the street and down two or three blocks… It’s insane.”
Nix 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 currently planned for them 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.
Plus she said she’d be asking her staff to have to operate in an area that is not on par with other offices and they’d lose their good parking situation, she said it’s not fair.
“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 Cindy Carpenter said they need to rearrange the space to accommodate the auditor’s needs.
“We gain a good economy of scale to have the auditor next to the treasurer and recorder so from a customer service standpoint we serve more people by bringing her here,” she said. “So let’s look at it with that lens. and try to be responsive.”
Dixon agreed.
“Obviously we don’t want to put her in a space that doesn’t work well, that doesn’t make any sense. We need to look at that and see how we’re going to fix it,” he said and later added. “We need to make certain the dollars we’re spending for all this study and all this moving, one way or another we’ve to get everybody onboard.”
The commissioners asked the state to do a financial performance audit back in 2011 and that’s when space consolidation first surfaced. There have been two space utilization studies since then, the latest was a $145,000 effort by CBRE, Inc. in 2022.
The commissioners hired Dayton-based LWC Incorporated last year for up to $86,000 to do to help execute the moves to the GSC and the Liberty Fairfield building. A new contract is pending for structural drawings which will amount to a percentage of the construction costs.
The commissioners have created a $45 million capital reserve fund to pay for executing the space study among other projects.
According to County Administrator Judi Boyko, “additional space at the Government Service Center is currently not available,” but she told the Journal-News a work session to discuss the progress of the space reutilization project will be scheduled.
“Of course, providing appropriate and necessary space to the elected offices in order to conduct their statutory responsibilities productively and efficiently, is a mandate,” she said. “Though minimizing disruption to the existing offices as we worked with the architect to define the layout and program the Recorder’s and Auditor’s proposed space was a clear objective of the board of commissioners.”
Cost estimates for the aforementioned moves haven’t been finalized but Dixon previously gave a rough estimate of $25 million for another piece of the right-sizing project. The county is building a new facility for the coroner and the sheriff’s dispatch center on the Princeton Road campus where the Board of Elections resides.
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