Plans finalized for new county elections office Colfax

The county-owned building on he corner of Main and Upton street is slated to soon house the county elections office.

Only two more elections will be counted amid the orange-faced cupboards and tan fridge of the Public Service Building kitchen.

Whitman County’s elections department has finalized a floor plan for a new office in the county-owned building at the corner of Main and Upton Streets. The vacant building last housed Greg’s Electric and prior to that housed Harrison Electric.

“I’m gonna miss this old kitchen,” said Debbie Hooper, county elections supervisor.

Bulk of the cost will be paid from a $360,000 Help America Vote Act grant the county received in 2005.

One point of the grant is to provide more accessibility to disabled voters, according to county auditor Eunice Coker. The new building, she said, accomplishes just that.

Elections moved into the kitchen in July 2008. Prior to that, ballots were opened and counted in a dark corner of the county vault.

The plan calls for a complete remodeling of the front half of the building, now mostly empty.

Hooper, Coker and Bob Reynolds, county facilities manager, are slated to meet with architect Michael Beaman of Portland this afternoon, Thursday.

The group will finalize details like how the building will be wired and what color scheme will be used on new carpet and drapes.

Coker said she hopes for a red, white and blue color scheme.

The design includes a lobby area for voters to register and for the county canvass board to review ballots. Election workers will be stationed behind windows and a glass window will provide the public a view of the election count.

A storage room in the back corner of the remodeled portion of the building will be used as storage for ballots. Archived elections information will be behind a cyclone fence in the storage room.

Archived elections results are currently stored in the vault. Information like district maps and boundaries are stored in the auditor’s office.

The plans at this point call for a $485,000 cost for the remodel, but officials think that price tag could drop.

“We think we’re going to be able to bring costs back down because of this competitive bidding climate,” said County Commissioner Greg Partch.

The call for bids is scheduled to go out in late-June or early-July.

Original intent of the grant was to install a new elevator that would accommodate wheelchair-bound voters. However, since the elevator would not be exclusively for the elections department, the federal Elections Assistance Commission vetoed the project.

The money has been sitting in an account with the Washington Secretary of State for the past five years.

“A lot of that time was spent waiting for federal elections to say ‘no’ to that elevator,” said Coker.

Coker said one point of the grant is to provide more accessibility to disabled voters. The new building, she said, accomplishes just that.

It will have two doors from the street into the lobby.

The corner of the auditor’s office still used by the elections department will be converted for more office space for payroll clerks and accounting staff, Coker said.