ST. CLAIRSVILLE — The future home of the Belmont County Health Department is one payment closer to completion.

The County Board of Commissioners passed a motion to pay an invoice to Grae-Con Construction in the amount of $934,211.24 for construction costs on the building.

“This is an extremely expensive project,” Belmont County Commissioner JP Dutton said. “This is roughly a $20 million project. I think it’s the second most expensive project we have ever taken on, number one being our current water plant, which was built a couple years ago for $28 million.

“We’re solving a lot of issues with this project,” he added. “We’re solving space issues with the health department, an important situation in terms of Belmont county records, in terms of where they’re going to be located, along with demolishing that building once the records are out of the current space. And then, of course, we’ve never had space for the Belmont County Coroner.”

Dutton then gave the floor to Belmont County Coroner Amanda Fisher to speak on the importance of the future health department.

“A lot of people don’t realize and are kind of shocked to find out that, first of all, we don’t have a physical office at all,” Fisher said. “So everything is done at my private practice: meeting families, giving loved ones belongings. Everything has to go through my office.

“But worse than that is that our current morgue is a shed in the parking lot of the Health Department,” she added. “That was there before I was there, before I became the coroner. That was one of the very first things week one I came in and said, ‘we have got to do something about our work situation,”

Fisher said the county morgue had previously been housed at East Ohio Regional Hospital. When that closed in 2019, the county had to come up with a temporary solution. That temporary solution, though, became permanent.

“So the problem lies in when you have a family come and do an identification, and you bring them to the health department, you walk them over to this building that they probably think the lawn equipment is in, and you slide up a garage door and there are two coolers in there,” she said. “There’s not enough space to work in there.”

She added that another difficulty has been when she has to load or unload a deceased person out in the open in the parking lot of the current Health Department.

“Anyone driving by Route 331 can see what we’re doing, so you feel very disrespectful to the deceased and to their family,” she said. “I can’t praise the commissioners enough, because as soon as they were made aware of the issues that our office had, they just simply weren’t aware, because no one had ever brought it to their attention, they were like, Okay, we have to do something about this. We’ve got to make it right. We’ve got to figure out what we can do. In the meantime, they did find space for us here (in the Belmont County Courthouse) so that we can meet with families if I’m not comfortable.”

Fisher said that grief can affect people in odd ways, and sometimes a relative may be angry when coming to her personal office. She said a temporary solution was an office space at the courthouse that she may utilize to meet with people in the meantime.

“To say that I’m very excited about this project is probably an understatement,” Fisher said. “I’m just over the moon about the completion of this project and what it will offer. We’ll have meeting space for families, a very respectful viewing area where loved ones can come to make identifications and be able to say goodbyes before maybe a family member is cremated. We’ll be able to unload into a private back area and come into a garage and close the door. So everything about this is going to be great.”

Dutton praised Fisher and her team for their patience, adding that with local government sometimes projects can progress very quickly but sometimes there can be delays.

“We hoped the project would be further along than it is at this point, but the bottom line is, it’s going to be completed next year. It became a complex project because you have different uses for the building, which I think really is going to be good in the long term,” Dutton said. “I think it’s a good mixture of uses, but there can be complicating factors to put a project like that together in terms of what everyone’s needs are and how those all fit into the overall project.”