MANSFIELD — The five-story Richland County Courthouse was built in 1968 at a cost of around $2 million.
Suffice to say, building costs have increased in the past half century. According to amortization.org, $1 in 1968 would be worth $8.75 today due to inflation.
That hasn’t dissuaded current county commissioners, however, from continuing a campaign to physically improve the administration building at 50 Park Ave. East in downtown Mansfield.
The latest step came Thursday when commissioners approved seeking professional design services for a remodeling of the ground floor (including the Land Bank offices), commons areas throughout the building and nine of the 10 restrooms in the building.
The remaining bathroom is already being redone as part of the ongoing remodeling of “L2” to allow for the relocation of the Clerk of Courts offices.
(Below is a PDF with the “request for qualifications” approved by Richland County commissioners on Thursday.)
County administrator Andrew Keller said funding for the latest proposed project will tart with American Rescue Plan Act funds set aside for the “L2” work. The estimate for that work was $2.25 million and the accepted bid for the work was $1.56 million.
Keller said the remaining $600,000 will be applied to the new remodeling project, which Commissioner Tony Vero said Wednesday could cost around $1.6 million.
“So we’ll continue to utilize our (ARPA) revenue loss dollars to make up the difference, whatever that may be. We have very rough estimates at this point since we don’t have an architect under contract yet, but we hope to have a total estimate of construction here in the coming months,” Keller said.
“Tony and I have discussed the $1.6 (million) number, but it could be plus or minus,” Keller said.
He said the county hopes to have a contract signed with an architect in the first half of 2024.
“We would like to see a (construction) bid package go out hopefully this summer. Late summer, fall at the latest, and it could end up being another attractive winter work sort of project for a general contractor,” Keller said.
Vero, a member of the Land Bank board, said it’s important to improve the office spaces for the organization, which operates on the ground floor originally used as administrative offices for the sheriff’s department.
Currently, the board meets around a conference table in the middle of the room with members of the public and other officials seated around the room behind them. The Land Bank was formed in 2012.
“Right now it’s cramped. We’ve even talked about how we want to orient the seating for the Land Bank board members because there’s a lot of room for improvement,” he said.
“The Richland County Land Bank has achieved much publicity and notoriety for the work we’ve done in the county for a Land Bank of our size. So much so that the Ohio Land Bank Conference is now in Mansfield.
“That space is simply not appropriate for the type of work and service the Land Bank does,” Vero said. “This is a long time coming.”
Once the Clerk of Courts office is relocated to “L2,” commissioners plan to construct a fourth Common Pleas courtroom in its place.
“After that is done, we hopefully can do on the second and third floors what we have done on the first floor,” Vero said, pointing out none of the capital improvement projects being done at the courthouse and around the county have not required the county to borrow “a single dollar.”
Keller said, “Once we complete the entire scope of this RFQ, along with the L2 RFQ, the vast majority of all of the publicly accessible areas of the building will have been updated and made more accessible to the public.
“(That has been) the commissioners’ emphasis from the beginning, to make government offices accountable to the public and available to the public,” he said.