Elections remodeling out for bid

November’s general election should be the last counted in the former kitchen area on the first floor of the Public Service Building.

Whitman County this week called for bids from contractors to build an elections office. The project entails a remodeling of the vacant building at the corner of Main and Upton streets. The building last housed Greg’s Electric and prior to that housed Harrison Electric.

County officials estimate the project will cost more than $450,000. The bulk of the cost will be footed by a $360,000 grant the county received in 2005 through the federal Help America Vote Act.

Bids will be opened Aug. 2, with a contract awarded shortly thereafter. A pre-bid conference with contractors is scheduled for July 15.

The county late last fall hired a contractor for a $105,500 revamp of the building’s roof. Most of the funds for that project came out of real estate excise taxes.

Bob Reynolds, county facilities manager, said construction should begin by the first of September.

One aim of the grant is to provide better accessibility to disabled voters, said County Auditor Eunice Coker. The remodeled building will have two street-level doors into the lobby.

Only the front half of the building will be remodeled. It now stores equipment needed for courthouse repairs and the some of the county’s emergency communications equipment.

The renovation design by Michael Beaman, Portland architect, 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.

Coker said she had a number of ideas for how to use the portion of the auditor’s office now reserved for elections space, including using it as space if she absorbs the county’s finance department.