The new Logan County Commission building will be on display for everyone to see tomorrow during an open house.

The commission purchased the former Esposito law office building for $325,000 several weeks ago and, until recently, it had been under renovation. The building, which sits directly across from the Logan County Courthouse and beside Peeble’s on Stratton Street, is now open for business.

The new county commission building has offices for each commissioner, along with a conference room, a lunch room and space for the Logan County Chamber of Commerce, the Hatfield-McCoy Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, the Educational Charitable Foundation and the Logan County floodplain coordinator’s office.

“We’re excited to do the open house on Thursday,” Logan County Chamber of Commerce and Hatfield-McCoy Convention and Visitor’s Bureau Director Debrina Williams said. “We’ll be opening the new building to the general public and to our Logan County Chamber of Commerce membership. We’ll be doing tours for whoever would like to come in and take a look.”

Williams said the new building has enough room to house the Chamber and the CVB and other agencies.

“We would not have been able to have done that without the purchase of this building,” Williams said. “Otherwise, as an individual organization, we would not have been able to afford that.”

The open house will be held from noon to 5 p.m. It is open to the public. The ribbon-cutting ceremony will be held at 2 p.m.

“We invite everyone to attend and to stay and speak with officials from the agencies housed in this building,” Williams said. “This is a great building that has had some renovation and it’s no longer an empty building. It’s a wonderful place to be able to extend southern hospitality, not only to local residents, but also to visitors from out of state and out of our area. I’m excited to be here. We’re excited to be able to showcase this great building and let everyone come in and take a look.”

Logan County Administrator Roscoe “Rocky” Adkins said the commission and other government agencies in the Logan County Courthouse were running out of room and needed more space. So, when the former law office building came open, the county bought it cheaper than they could have built and entirely new facility.

“Every officeholder was asking the commission for more room, because of the mandates through the court systems of record keeping that we didn’t have to do 20 years ago that we have to do today,” Adkins said. “It’s not us adding personnel, but it’s a need to storage room for all the documents that have to be kept.

“We acquired 9,000-square foot of office space at $325,000 and that included all the furniture except four private office furnishings. When we checked to see what it would cost to build the same amount of square footage, it was well over a million dollars.”

The majority of the renovations were done by county employees. Only one outside company was brought in to install a floor covering, Adkins said.

“This is an annex to the courthouse and we wanted to structure it toward making this a one-stop shop for businesses to come and see what they have to do to become a part of the county and to come in and be exposed to the business side of the county,” Adkins said. “We think it’s good for the public. The whole idea came about because there was no room at the courthouse for the offices that needed to expand. That was the driving force. It became evident to the commissioners that we could also help the public by allowing these other agencies to operate in the same facility.”

The building was originally a bank before it was used as a law firm.

To contact Staff Writer Michael Browning, call 304-752-6950, extension 309, or email him at mbrowning@loganbanner.com.