Stark Auditor renovates offices to reduce public confusion – Massillon Independent

The Stark County Auditor's office is temporarily on the third floor of the Stark County Office Building until December. Workers are renovating and reconfiguring the auditor's second-floor offices so the public has one common point of entry, so officials have a large meeting space, to improve security and to get all of the auditor's office staff not in the information technology department on one floor.

CANTON Alan Harold became Stark County Auditor in 2011, and he noticed that several people would wander around his offices often looking confused.

To execute a property transfer, people had to visit three locations in the "little maze we have here," in the auditor's office inside the County Office Building downtown, which stretched from the eastern side of the second floor by the county treasurer's offices, to the south side and to the west side by the commissioners' offices, Harold said. And the auditor's fiscal department was on the third floor. Visitors were often asking for directions to the department they needed.

The auditor's second-floor staff moved up temporarily to the former third-floor offices of the Adult Probation department. The county has hired a contractor to reconfigure and renovate the auditor's second floor offices to establish one public entrance, convert office space into a large meeting space and revamp the office floor layout so Harold's entire staff can be consolidated onto the second floor.

The work is scheduled to be completed by December.

Harold said the office had more than one public point of entry besides the entrance by the reception desk. Any member of the public could pop into most auditor employee's offices with no notice. Harold felt it wasn't very secure. With the employees spread throughout the building, it made efficient communication between staffers more difficult.

In addition, Harold cut his staff by 23 employees. Much of the old layout had empty space. He felt it would be more efficient to consolidate the second-floor staff and the third-floor staff into 14,000 square feet on the second floor and add new security features.

Planning

Last year, Harold and his staff started planning the entire office layout in consultation with the commissioners, who control some of the funding and oversee the building's operations. The cost of the contractor, NL Construction of Canton, ended up being $367,601 after the cost was estimated at $430,000. The architect, Motter and Meadows, cost about $27,000.

About $100,000 of the bill is being funded from money remaining from the auditor's closed Bureau of Motor Vehicles office, which was shuttered in 2014, and about $300,000 is coming from the real estate assessment fund, which is funded by a percentage of property taxes collected.

Harold has 78 employees. Twenty-seven work in the county's information technology department on Fourth Street NE. The remaining employees work in the Stark County Office Building.

The staff moved out of the second-floor offices by July 20 and into the vacated third-floor offices of what was Adult Probation, which moved into the Frank T. Bow building.

Consolidation

Harold will return to his office on the second floor and near him will be stationed staffers who handle business vendor's licenses, dog tags, property tax supervision and Board of Revision appeals.

The eight Fiscal Department staffers, who handle the county payroll for 2,600 county employees and the payment of $220 million a year in bills for the county, will vacate the third floor and move to the second floor, where the appraisers once had their space.

It will be up to the commissioners to reassign the third-floor space to a new tenant.

He said the workers will eventually remove asbestos in a safe manner from the flooring in the 50-year-old building, replace the 25-year-old carpeting and repaint the walls. Angela Blakney, Harold's executive assistant, who's been involved in much of the planning, picked out a light shade of gray for the new carpet. Harold's office will also buy new furniture and frame old county maps to display on the walls.

Reach Repository writer Robert Wang at (330) 580-8327 or robert.wang@cantonrep.com. Twitter: @rwangREP

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Stark Auditor renovates offices to reduce public confusion - Massillon Independent