BETHESDA — The Board of Goshen Township Trustees hosted an open house at its new Maintenance and Meeting Hall on Saturday morning.

The Goshen Township trustees have been working on securing a new building for the past eight years.

“It’s taken a long time, but we finally found a way to put a levy in place that would generate the funds to enable us to make this happen,” Trustee J.R. Whitley said.

The building’s meeting hall is dedicated to former longtime Goshen Township fiscal officer Teresa Schafer.

According to the trustees, Schafer was the one who was able to get the ball rolling on the levy process.

“It means a lot,” Schafer said. “I was the Goshen Township fiscal officer for 36 years, and the first year I was in we barely made it through. For them to be able to build a facility 36 years later like this is just unbelievable to me.

“Back when I was starting out if somebody would have told me that something like this would happen, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

Whitley said he believes it will be a great addition for the township.

Until this new facility was completed, the Goshen Township trustees rented two separate buildings. Both were old coal mine buildings that were repurposed. Whitley said one of the facilities only had a dirt floor.

“We were on well water that didn’t work most of the time, so this new facility is on county water and is fully concrete and climate controlled,” he said. “Before, we had equipment sitting outside, but now all of our equipment will be held under a roof.”

The new facility allows the trustees to consolidate everything into one place that it owns instead of renting out two separate properties that weren’t fully adequate to meet the township’s needs.

“We didn’t even have a place to maintain our equipment or store materials,” Schafer said.

The new facility has enclosed material sheds to keep its materials from freezing in the winter months. In addition to the new facility, Goshen Township has been steadily upgrading its equipment to better service its community. Schafer believes that having all of the equipment and staff in one place will be safer for the employees and allow them to respond more quickly when they are needed.

“It took a lot of years to be able to get to this point. It took a lot of years of saving money and watching the budget in order to get to this,” Shafer added. “When I started, there weren’t the funds that there are now. It took a long time to save and plan for this.”