$12 Million City-County Building Project Underway in Wheeling
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WHEELING - The City-County Building in Wheeling is on its way to becoming more energy efficient, but it’s going to take 18 months, lots of dust and the temporary displacement of city and county workers to achieve that end.
Motorists passing by the building may notice the dumpsters and cranes parked alongside the building, but they can't really see the workers out of view replacing the second floor roof. A new roof on the fifth floor is also going to be installed.
Inside, a large window in the commission chamber was removed, and its space initially boarded up. It has since been replaced with an attractive modern window, and all the windows in the building soon will be new.
Outside, there has been excavation work in the back parking lot in preparation for the placement of new electrical lines.
The work is all part of a $12 million courthouse improvement project that also will see a new heating, ventilation and air conditioning system installed, and the ceilings throughout the building lowered.
The work is expected to be completed by the summer of 2025, and that's actually sooner than was expected, explained Melissa Marco, project director for Ohio County.
Workers in the building will need to be moved temporarily as upgrades happen in their offices, and the initial plan was to move them to the former law library - considered a "swing space" - as the work takes place in their spaces.
Voting machines have been housed in the former law library in recent years, and these have now been temporarily relocated to a safe place in the courthouse annex, according to Marco.
The city of Wheeling continues to rent out the former police station area within the building, and city officials now have agreed to permit the county to use that area as a second swing space for displaced employees.
This will permit two offices to be upgraded at a time, and for the work to be completed twice as fast, according to Marco.
City offices will be the first to be displaced, and plans call for that to begin sometime in April, she said. The workers will likely be out of their regular offices for about 30 days.
"The city was amazing to allow us to use the police department because we were just going to have one swing space," Marco said. "That was going to drag out the project a lot.
"Now that we have that second swing space, it helped us consolidate and bring the timeline way down."
She noted it is very difficult for the public to see the work that is presently happening in the building.
"You can hear that they are working on our roof right now," she said. "As long as the weather holds, they will continue to work on the second floor roof, and that should take about three weeks."
Just four of the building's many windows were removed as "a test" to see what work would be involved. Two of the windows now have been replaced without any issues, she reported.