By Traci Chapman
Published on February 2, 2008

The county’s “courthouse annex” remodel is moving slowly forward, but officials are “ecstatic” about the cost savings involved in the project.

Construction supervisor Dennis Land said the bids received for the remodeling project — the future home of the treasurer’s and assessor’s offices — totaled about $300,000.

The annex is located directly east of the county courthouse at 200 N. Choctaw Avenue in El Reno.
He said the total cost so far, due to inmate labor and buying materials directly from suppliers, is far less.

“We are right about at the $8,000 mark on labor and materials right now,” he said. “We will have more materials to buy, and that doesn’t include running the telephone and data lines across the street. But we’re still way under where we thought we would be.”

Major expenses still to be included in the assessor’s office are carpet and data lines. However, county officials said part of what could have been a “huge expense” has been minimized in part through the purchase of the new phone system in September.

“We would have needed to run all those lines anyway,” District 1 Commissioner Phil Carson said. “The phones themselves can be just picked up and moved over.”

Carson said Land’s “creativity” has aided the project.

“Dennis uses everything from the building he can,” he said, pointing to insulation removed from the old Red Rock Counseling offices. “It’s perfectly fine, and it will save the county a lot of money in the long run.”

While the remodel of the assessor’s office is in the “home stretch,” there are still administrative hurdles, such as approval of a crosswalk between the courthouse and new offices and renovation of the sidewalk, which Carson said he believes is “unsafe.” County officials are working with the city of El Reno to complete those projects.

Once the assessor’s office is finished, Land and his crew will move next door to the future treasurer’s office. Carson said he believes those offices will need far less construction due to the general layout of the location.

“The offices on the other (assessor’s) side were so broken up into small little spaces that were basically unusable,” he said. “While this needs work for a public service area, updating paint and carpeting — things like that — it looks to me like it will need less actual ‘construction.’”

Land estimated the assessor’s office would be complete in July. That timeline will partially be determined by the comple- tion of the crosswalk and movement of data cable and other “technology-related” work.

He said he did not want to estimate a time frame for completion of the treasurer’s office until he began renovations and formal discussions with Treasurer David Radcliff and his staff.