Schuylkill County Commissioners approved shuffling around hundreds of thousands of dollars in its Capital Projects budget on Wednesday to buy a property in Pottsville it plans to use for storage.
Back in June, the Commissioners approved a sales agreement to purchase 306 Prospect St. in the city’s Jalappa section. After clearing some hurdles, the building was apparently OK’d for the County to buy at a price of $375,000.
This location was the former home of Pottsville Moving & Storage.
During their Work Session meeting, the Commissioners actually approved $381,200 for the purchase. That, according to County Finance Director Paul Buber, is to cover the cost of closing and settlement on the property.
Buber explained the money was freed up by “adjusting the appropriate line items within the Capital Projects budget.
The County government plans to use the hulking 25,000-square foot property to house many of its paper records, those that apparently can’t be digitized for various reasons.
Commissioners felt it necessary to purchase this property rather than continuing to pay rent on a property they believed was not worth the money they were spending.
“We’ve had a situation where we had a storage building that was not adequate. It was really not a good place to have our storage. We were paying way too much rent for a building that was sub-standard,” Commissioner Chairman Boots Hetherington said during the meeting.
Back in June, the Commissioners also said they had been storing records in a space above Courtroom 1 at the Courthouse and the weight of all that material was causing structural issues.
$381K Likely Just the Beginning
Now that it appears the County will get its hands on this commercial property in Pottsville, it’s likely not the end of sinking money into it.
It’s a rather old building and huge. Old buildings, even those that have been well-maintained over the years, need renovations. Big buildings just need more because, well, they’re big.
And the Courthouse doesn’t just purchase a property and leave it as-is. The folks there always find a reason to renovate and retrofit the properties they buy for their own needs.
This building likely won’t be any different, even if it’s only used for storage.
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