photo by: Joselyn King

Ohio County Clerk Mike Kelly, shows the tons of books that need to be removed from his office so that a reconfiguring of space can occur.

WHEELING – As work continues on the installation of a new heating and air conditioning system at the City-County Building in Wheeling, construction will include the restructuring of the office spaces used by the Ohio County Clerk’s Office and the County Prosecutor’s Office on the second floor.

Tons of county records books are set to be moved from the clerk’s office, freeing up about 2,000 square feet of space, County Clerk Mike Kelly has estimated.

The County Clerk’s Office will then move all its operations to the south end of its space toward the commission office. A wall will be constructed at about the halfway point of the current clerk’s office, and the northern end will then be merged with the neighboring County Prosecutor’s Office.

That space is desperately needed, according to Assistant County Prosecutor Shawn Turak.

Details and updates about the current construction happening at the City-County Building typically are discussed during Ohio County commission meetings, but the meeting initially set for Tuesday night was postponed.

Commission President Don Nickerson and Commissioner Randy Wharton each explained the meeting was moved to 6 p.m. on June 11 to provide staff an extra week to prepare for budget revisions to be completed and approved by the commission before June 15.

Although county offices were mostly empty Tuesday evening, both Kelly and Turak remained in their office at work and discussed the new buildout of their office spaces.

“I’m excited about it,” Turak said. “I think right now we are on top of each other. My hope is that after we expand, each attorney will have some privacy, have a door, and be able to meet with people or confer with witnesses privately.

“Right now, we don’t even have a conference room. As we get ready for trials, it makes it very difficult to talk to witnesses. I don’t know when it’s going to happen, but we are anxious to expand.”

She showed how tight the current prosecutor’s office is. Some offices meant for one person occupancy house three secretaries, while prosecutors sit in a tight “bullpen” area.

Turak isn’t certain yet when the move is going to occur.

“With our caseload, I haven’t had the luxury of time to sit down and ask what are we going to do, and when are we going to do it,” Turak said.

Offices in the City-County Building are being temporarily relocated to the former law office on the fifth floor as their ceilings are removed and new ductwork for heating and air conditioning is installed.

The ceiling has been removed in the hallway outside the City Clerk’s Office, and Kelly hopes the books in his office are removed before they start work inside the office. He estimates the books to collectively weigh about 26 tons – not including shelving or additional books presently being stored in the basement of the City-County Building.

Plans are in the works to move them to another facility as they must legally be kept, but Kelly said the information contained within them is now all online.

“Thank goodness I have the books online, because you would never get the books up there (to the fifth floor),” he explained. “This way, they can move us up there and we would be out of the way.

“But it would be so much easier if they moved the books now and cleared that space so, when they go in to rip up that space, they don’t have to deal with the books being in their way.”

The location where the record books are being moved has yet to be determined, but they will be close by and accessible, but that won’t be the case while the office is on the fifth floor, according to Kelly.

“People who want books and not the computer are not going to have that option,” he continued.