Staff photo / Ed Runyan David Betras, a Mahoning County Board of Elections member, spoke to the county commissioners again Thursday to ask them to move the board of elections out of the county’s Oakhill building in Youngstown.

YOUNGSTOWN — Mahoning County administrator Audrey Tillis began a presentation to the county commissioners Thursday on county-owned buildings by saying the county is in a financial position to do something it could not when it purchased the former Southside Medical Center two decades ago: create a “complete plan, not just one building.”

The county commissioners authorized the Western Reserve Port Authority to look at the buildings all 51 county departments use at 22 locations and help determine the best plan for all of them.

“You’ve asked for a complete plan, and through this process, that is what we want to do,” she said. “When I met with you the last two Thursdays, we said we won’t come to you until we come with something that was complete.

“The county has not been in this place before where we have been able to do this,” she said, noting that Commissioner Anthony Traficanti was a new county commissioner in the early 2000s when the decision was made to purchase the former Southside Medical Center and turn it into the county’s Oakhill building. The county was not in the financial position to create this type of comprehensive plan, she said.

“This allows us to move forward. This allows us to look at the future for our citizens, for our children and how we move forward,” she said.

Anthony Trevena, Port Authority executive director, said the agency reached out to BSHM Architects, a local architectural firm, and Michael Ruscitti, a partner in the firm, and produced “data-driven, research-driven facts. It’s information on how things operate and how we can be more efficient.”

He said the research “looked at granular levels of the buildings, how the flow works, when your consumers or your constituents use our facilities, how many, what are the peak times, how much space they currently have, how much space they need, whether it’s more, whether it’s less. We looked at traffic patterns, where customers come from.”

Trevena said, “The goal is to look at what is possible with what we have existing and what we could have in the future. The focus was on looking at a modern, safe, state-of-the-art facilities that serve our constituents and our community to the best interests of them, looking to make sure all of them are accessible, whether it’s parking, whether it’s accessibility to get in and out, efficient delivery of services to the residents of Mahoning County.”

Krista Beniston of the port authority said she spent more than a year helping to compile a facility-needs study of all of the departments — how they serve the public, how they work with other departments, “kind of their overall space-size needs.”

Thirty interviews were done among the departments, talking to staff, and looking at the ways to best serve the staff and residents, she said.

“By far, most of the departments are working phenomenally,” she said.

There are several “areas of opportunity for more efficiency and to better serve the employees and public.”

One is a facility on Bev Road in Boardman and how it can “be optimized”; the Oakhill building and “how that could be and also the potential of new buildings, such as” the building the county recently purchased on Belmont Avenue in Youngstown; and the Patriot Building on Patriot Boulevard in Austintown, Beniston said.

Allan Landfried, county facilities manager, said he has worked to “fully, accurately understand the current use of (the Oakhill building) right now.”

He said the building is at 46% occupancy. The common and mechanical areas take up 29%. Twenty-one percent is unused, and about 4% is storage.

He said an evaluation went “room by room, using each room in the building.” Tenants occupy 6% of the building, and county offices occupy 40%, or about 177,344 square feet. The entire building is 381,553 square feet.

The largest group of tenants is the county Job and Family Services at 26%. The Board of Elections uses 6%, Green Team 2% and the county coroner 2%.

Sarah Lown, the port authority’s public finance manager, noted that one challenge of Oakhill is that it has “wide corridors, those huge mechanical rooms, so there’s always going to be a large amount of unusable space in that facility.”

Lown said, “Because of sound, fiscal management and conservative practices, the bond rating is up, revenues are up and your expenses are down, so we have opportunities now. Are we going to create a scenario for the next generation of residents of Mahoning County?”

Landfried said the Bev Road facility is 28,000 square feet with uses by the Green Team and “warehouse” storage, among other things. Ideas for uses there are microfilming and storage space for auction items.

Lown said the county’s purchase of the building on Belmont Avenue in Youngstown can follow in the footsteps of the Campus of Care in Austintown, which was a “home-run hit. The veterans said, ‘We want a building, and it’s right next door to the (VA) Medical Center, room for veterans housing next door.’ We are really doing a second campus of care for veterans.”

Ruscitti then talked about the Patriot Building in Austintown, which has “six entrances, making this a perfect opportunity for multiple departments to use this facility. The parking and access to highways make it within reach for anyone in the county.”

He said interviews with departments helped identify “departments that could land here, including Board of Elections, building inspections, planning, soil and water and opportunity to locate the title department and coroner” and others. Lown said everyone loves the building.

“We think we can more than fill it with county departments,” she said.

Earlier Thursday, Dave Betras, Mahoning County Board of Elections member, again spoke to the commissioners about the need to move the board of elections out of the Oakhill building. He presented photos showing how bad things are in the areas used by the board of elections and compared them to the facilities used by the board of elections in Columbiana County.

Among the things studied regarding the Oakhill building are the revenue costs to maintain the building.

Jen Pangio, director of the county’s Office of Management and Budget, said the revenues are remaining pretty flat but the expenses have been rising in the past three years.

Tillis noted that because the county commissioners have been trying to decide “what to do with the building, they have deferred some of the things that they need to do.” She said the commissioners did not want to take dollars and “put them out if we are not going to stay there.”

Landfriend said “a lot” needs to be done to Oakhill.

Among the items are the parking deck needs improvement, windows, elevators modernization, HVAC modernization, plumbing, moving restrooms being relocated, exterior repointing, work on “aging electrical systems,” road and parking paving, and roofing over the Alta facilities.

“Those are just the high-level areas that would need to be addressed,” he said.

He said he does not have an “official estimate” of cost but is working on that.