In the coming year, York County’s offices will experience a jigsaw puzzle of change.
During their regular meeting Tuesday night, the county’s Board of Supervisors approved a new lease agreement that would move the Parks and Recreation Department and the registrar’s office to the Washington Square Shopping Center.
The move is just one in a master plan of movements for offices throughout the county, said Neil Morgan, the county’s administrator.
“Everything is related to everything else,” Morgan said. “If you move something over here something else has to move somewhere else.”
The county already had a long lasting lease agreement for the Senior Center in the area and Morgan said it made sense for these operations to move closer to each other for convenience and so they can use each other’s spaces if need be. Additionally, he said there was ample space for parking and the location would be cost-effective since the county is already renting such a large space with the Senior Center.
During the meeting, Morgan said that’s also a good option because it would be cheaper than buying a site and building a new facility.
Morgan said the long term plan is one that involves the construction of new buildings, renovations and movement for many different areas. For example, the York County Library will have to close when it begins its renovation process and during that time, it might be able to move into where the old fire station was located now that the county has a new fire station.
Both the registrar’s office and the Parks and Recreation department were operating in a location that no longer met the departments’ needs and moving to Washington Square seemed like the best option.
Additionally, moving the Parks and Recreation department would free up a space to consolidate the Department of Planning Development Services.
“It’s really driven by various interrelated space problems in different areas of the county,” Morgan said.
Morgan describes the process as a jigsaw puzzle of different pieces and the new lease agreement is just one piece to the puzzle. He said the process began when the Capital Improvement Project was approved in 2018 after a Space Study showed many of these places needed more room.
In a chart depicting the moving pieces involved in the project, most of the processes are expected to be done by the 2023. The Parks and Recreation Department and the registrar’s office will move by September.
However, Morgan said, the timeline is an educated guess.
“You can’t analyze the pros and cons of one piece without analyzing how it all fits together,” he said. “So our goal is doing that as efficiently and with as little disruption as possible.”
