Editorial: County makes right decision to lease office space

Published 12:02 am Sunday, April 14, 2019

The Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (SPLOST) lost last month, so Whitfield County’s immediate future does not include two new administrative buildings, which the SPLOST would have funded. In all, the SPLOST would have funded about $34 million in new county buildings and renovations to existing facilities.

Despite the public’s rejection of the six-year, $100 million proposal, one issue remains: the county needs to move out of Administrative Building No. 2, which is a former church across the street from the Whitfield County Courthouse, due to safety and structural concerns. County staff and the Whitfield County Board of Commissioners have spent the days since the March 19 special election determining their best plan of action.

On Thursday, they made it official.

Commissioners signed a two-year lease to rent the top three floors of the Wells Fargo Bank as office space. The bank is at 201 S. Hamilton St., just a few blocks from the current administrative buildings. The county will pay $10,160 a month plus part of the utilities for a little over 18,000 square feet.

The shuffling of county offices will begin soon.

Moving from Administrative Building No. 1, also across the street from the courthouse, to the fourth and fifth floors of the Wells Fargo building are county administration, engineering, information technology, finance, human resources and public relations offices. The public defender’s office, which is in the building on Waugh Street that previously housed Ed Staten CPA and Rudolph’s Pizza, will move to the third floor of the Wells Fargo building.

Administrative Building No. 2 is used by the commissioners for their main meeting room, the accountability court offices and the RESOLV (Recognizing, Exposing, Stopping Our Learned Violence) Project anger management program, a nonprofit that works with the Northwest Georgia Family Crisis Center and the accountability courts (Domestic Violence Court, Drug Court and Mental Health Court) in Whitfield and Murray counties.

The county’s accountability courts will move from Administrative Building No. 2 into the vacated space at Administrative Building No. 1. Administrative Building No. 2 will no longer be used.

County officials hope to have all the moves completed by July 1, if not sooner.

The lease will cost the county close to a quarter of a million dollars, but “The funds that would otherwise be spent on rent and utilities for the current location of the Public Defender’s Office and utilities at Administrative Building No. 2 will pay a significant portion of the cost of the lease with Wells Fargo,” according to a county press release. The county currently rents the Waugh Street space for $3,500 a month.

Commissioners have not decided where they will hold their meetings. The Wells Fargo building has a room that can be used for work sessions. We have long urged commissioners to have their meetings in the courthouse jury assembly room — after all, the county owns the courthouse — or continue holding meetings in different parts of the county at their facilities.

Commissioners labeled the move as “a temporary alternative plan” in the press release and have not ruled out a new administrative building downtown. They haven’t publicly discussed the potential cost, but one would imagine it would be several million dollars.

We applaud the commissioners for their decision to rent space for county offices. Renting space is far less expensive than constructing a new building — or two. We see this as a win for taxpayers.

We hope commissioners, along with the taxpaying public, see the value in renting space versus spending millions for a new building.