“We’re so close to being completely in here that it’s almost hours away,” Coroner Greg Merchant told The Dispatch Wednesday afternoon.
Merchant is talking about moving his office into the old Ecolab building on Lehmberg Road, a space that has already proved to be a night-and-day difference from its former home in the old Maxxim Medical building off of Yorkville Park Square.
In April the Lowndes County Board of Supervisors bought the approximately 20,000-square-foot building in East Columbus for about $500,000. Ecolab ceased operations there in mid-2022.
Merchant said he is pleased with the new building.
“We’re excited to be in here, and it’s been designed for our needs,” Merchant said. “We were able to make it what we wanted, and we’re tickled to death.”
Merchant said the coroner’s office has been operating out of the building for a month or so, at least as far as the office space goes.
“Before my deputies all shared a desk or worked from home,” Merchant said. “With this (building) everyone has their own individual office, and everybody comes here and works now.”
Besides Merchant himself, the space is used by a part-time secretary and three deputies.
The coroners have been having to go back and forth to the old site to hold bodies, Merchant said, but he expects to be operating fully from the new building by the middle of next week.
“The cooler got moved in (Tuesday) and reassembled, and they’re servicing it now,” Merchant said. “It ought to be cooling within the hour.”
Merchant said the only “real construction” there was a 24-by-24-foot examination area, and otherwise they just “jostled stuff around” to make it work.
Families can view bodies in the new building, which wasn’t possible before.
“We couldn’t do that because of cross-contamination of evidence,” Merchant said. “We’ll be able to do it out of here because it’ll be two separate rooms (with a window between them).”
Merchant’s office has been housed in the old Maxxim building since 2009, but it was far from ideal.
“It just needed so much in the way of repairs,” Merchant said. “The leaks had gotten the best of us down there, and we were having mold problems. It just stayed moist and damp down there all the time.”
There are still a few “growing pains,” he said. For example, there still isn’t internet or phone service.
“We’re making do with some Wi-Fi boxes now, and using cell phones in the building,” Merchant said. “But if I need to print something I have to email it to myself and go somewhere else.”
County Administrator Jay Fisher told The Dispatch no decisions had been made for what to do with the rest of the building. Part of the building will be used as an alternate site for Lowndes County Emergency Management Agency, but all of the space isn’t spoken for yet.
Fisher said discussions were underway as far as potentially locating county offices there, but no decisions have been made.
Apex making Maxxim home
The rebirth of the Maxxim building is slowly gaining steam.
New Hope-based Apex Ammunition bought the building, which was jointly owned by the city and county, earlier this year. The county will be fully out of the building next week, and the city is in the process of moving out, according to Apex Financial Director Parker Stubbs.
Before much of anything can happen, the roof has got to be fixed, Stubbs said.
“We’re assessing the roof situation and trying to figure that out,” Stubbs said. “We don’t want a five- or 10-year fix. We want a permanent fix, so our first order of business is to address the roof.”
Stubbs said the roofer and the construction contractor have assessed the roof, but that’s as far as they have gotten.
“Once they decide what to do with the roof I think it’ll be balls to the wall getting after it,” Stubbs said.
Stubbs estimated production could be underway as soon as November, but emphasized they were “kind of at the mercy of the construction company as far as getting started.”
“We would love to go faster,” Stubbs said. “You’ve only got so much money, (so) you want to make sure you’re making the right decision as far as what the building needs and meeting our long-term as well as short-term needs.”
Brian Jones is the local government reporter for Columbus and Lowndes County.
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