Commission OKs firm for jail restoration
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ELKINS -- The Randolph County Commission approved the hiring of an architectural firm for the former county jail restoration project during its most recent meeting.
The county commission is restoring the former Randolph County Jail in order to make room for a second judge in the county beginning in 2025. Commissioner David Kesling gave a presentation about the project during the meeting and went over all the plans for the facility.
"We had sent out an 'expression of interest' to anybody interested in doing the architect work for the restoration of the old county jail," Kesling said. "We put that in the paper for several days and we had three firms respond to us with interest in doing the project."
Kesling said the commission did the interviews last week and chose Vannostrand Architects PLLC of Buckhannon. The other two firms showing interest were Thrasher Engineering of Bridgeport and McKinley Architecture and Engineering of Wheeling.
"All three firms presented very well," Kesling said. "Vannostrand has actually done work for the county before during the restoration of the basement in the old courthouse… They know the jail very well and came highly recommended. All three firms are very good, but Vannostrand does work in a lot of old buildings like the county jail and they are well known for that throughout the state."
Kesling made a motion to accept Vannostrand for the architecture work at the former county jail, and fellow Commissioners Cris Siler and Chris See voted to approve the hiring of the firm.
"We took all three firms through the jail and expressed what we would like to accomplish," Kesling said.
After the approval of the firm, Kesling offered a powerpoint presentation detailing some of the work planned for the structure. Kesling pointed out the first floor of the three-story building will house new administrative offices, a new IT office, new bathrooms, and a new county commission room.
The current county commission meeting room will likely be the new courtroom for one of the two judges in the county. In order to cater to the new judge's needs, plans are in place to remodel several areas in the Cain Annex.
"There's a new roof on the building, so there won't be a whole lot done on the outside of the building," Kesling said. "We do have to make the building ADA accessible, so we are going to do some parking in the back and put in a ramp that will come around to a new front porch."
Kesling showed that commissioners plan on converting the second floor into three new county commissioner offices.
"There used to be three bedrooms on the second floor back in the day," Kesling said. "We are going to put all three county commission offices on the second floor and another bathroom. We are also going to put a little meeting room on the second floor and an office for court security,"
Kesling said the foundation of the building and the basement are in good shape, according to the architects. He added that most of the funding for the project is already in place.
"We can use our coal allocation and some coal severance money we have left over for some of the funding for the project," Kesling said. "We also have money left over from a LATCF grant, which was the land grant we got from the federal government. So, we have money in those three accounts that we are looking to use for the project. We want to try and avoid any local taxpayer dollars going to this project."
Kesling said construction on the building should start within two to three months.