College expanding, CRI moving downtown, chamber may follow

Published 7:24 am Friday, May 13, 2011

Dalton State College is expanding south, but not too far down the road.

The Carpet and Rug Institute is moving downtown and the Dalton-Whitfield Chamber of Commerce may be headed there, too.

The CRI Board of Directors this week voted to agree to sell the CRI’s 15,506-square-foot, 40-year-old building on College Drive to Dalton State College. The purchase price was not made available.

The Dalton-based CRI will move into the old post office at 100 S. Hamilton St. The building previously served as the central office for Dalton Public Schools and is now owned by the city of Dalton. The move is expected to be completed by the beginning of 2012. CRI President Werner Braun said the chamber will also move to the post office building. Chamber President Brian Anderson did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment on Thursday.

City and chamber officials have had talks of using the site of the chamber’s current headquarters at the intersection of College Drive and Dug Gap Battle Road as a retention pond to help control flooding on McClellan Creek.

“My personal interest in this is to help in the spirit of continuing to revitalize the downtown area,” said Braun. “CRI has a lot of meetings every week that will bring people downtown. We have quite a few luncheon meetings and would certainly give an opportunity to the food services people downtown to cater our lunches.”

What the college will use the CRI building for is unclear. College officials did not immediately return a phone message seeking comment.

Braun said the CRI board was excited about giving the college more space since it is “landlocked,” with mountains to the west, I-75 to the east and limited space to the north and south. Moving will allow CRI to “reduce its environmental footprint,” which is what the industry has also focused on, Braun said.

“We have a lot of space here, a lot more than we need for the number of people that we have,” Braun said. “Being able to move into a building that is more right-sized for the number of folks we and the chamber have, we’ll reduce our environmental footprint and in addition to that, it will reduce our energy costs.”

The Hamilton Street building served as Dalton’s post office from 1909 to 1966 and was the school system’s central office from 1967 until March 2010. The school system swapped the building to the city in exchange for 5.2 acres at the corner of Waugh Street and Jones Street, including the former jail, which it plans to develop several years from now.

The school system currently occupies the third floor and part of the second floor in City Hall. School officials said that move saved them from having to pay up to $500,000 to replace the roof of the aging central office building.