Hamilton County may move some of its governmental operations to the former Chattanooga Gas Co. building.
On Wednesday, the Hamilton County Commission will vote whether to pay $3.1 million for the 26-year-old, two-story building on Preservation Drive in the Bonny Oaks Office and Industrial Park. The building measures 22,390 square feet and comes with a 14,000-square-foot warehouse and 8 acres of property.
In a recent meeting, county public works administrator Todd Leamon told commissioners the site gives the county a great alternative for housing departments now located downtown in the 100-year-old Newell Tower and the nearby information technology department building.
“It would basically replace a 1915 building and a building built around the early 1980s – that was built for the [computer] mainframe era – [and] replace those with a 1991 building in a better, centrally located area of the county,” Leamon said.
The downtown IT building has a lot of underused space because of its outdated mainframe configuration, while the Bonny Oaks site office provides a number of core essentials, including built-in communications capacity and back-up power, he said.