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Building Up: Wood County officials take tour of under construction Resiliency Center

By Brett Dunlap 4 min read

PARKERSBURG -- The new Wood County Resiliency Center will have a number of uses in times of emergencies, the lead architect of the project told local officials during a tour on Thursday.

Architect Adam Krason of ZMM Architects & Engineers of Charleston led the tour.

"We are on schedule to be completed by July," he said. "This is going to be a Swiss Army knife of a building.

"The goal is to serve as many functions as possible."

The building is being built on the site of the former Wood County Jail.

A number of local officials participated in the tour of the new Wood County Resiliency Center on Thursday. Those included Wood County Commissioners Blair Couch and Robert Tebay; Wood County Sheriff Rick Woodyard; Wood County Administrator Marty Seufer; Wood County Clerk Joe Gonzales; President and CEO of the Greater Parkersburg Convention and Visitors Bureau Mark Lewis; MOV Health Department Executive Director Eric Walker and others.

The building, which will cost over $13 million, was funded through American Recovery Act funds. It addresses issues the county had during the pandemic and will be able to handle other concerns. It is being built by United Construction Company (UCCI) of Parkersburg.

Couch said there is an opportunity to hold conventions, being able to host interim legislative sessions, training events, conferences, statewide association meetings and more as there were few other spaces locally that could accommodate such events.

There are smaller meeting rooms where breakout sessions can be held during larger meetings. The large meeting room could accommodate around 400 people. The CVB will be able to promote the space for events such as weddings and other events as the building will have a kitchen which can be utilized for food preparation during emergency situations. It could even provide temporary shelter in the event of an emergency.

The building will also house the county maintenance department and a backup 911 dispatching facility.

In the event of another pandemic event, they would be able to hold social distancing trials at the building as the facility has two holding cells in place, a sally port to bring in defendants (it could also be utilized for event setup) as well as space that can be used for jury deliberations. There are drive-through lanes in the new maintenance department that could be used for vaccinations/flu shots, distributing PPE, emergency food distribution and more.

Previously, they were doing such distributions in parking lots and in inclement weather.

"We were always playing catch-up," Couch said. "We weren't getting ahead of it.

"Using the pandemic funds, we will be able to do something to address the shortcomings the county had. There will be things that can happen that we don't even know about now that building will be able to accommodate."

Such a facility could have been utilized during the IEI fire and the derecho to provide things to the community the citizens expected, Couch said.

"We will be able to address a problem really quickly," Couch said. "There were so many things that we wanted to try and incorporate in a building. It is amazing that our architect was able to design something that could do all of that and keep it under budget."

Seufer was surprised by the size of the building as well as the number and size of the breakout meeting rooms.

There was a lot of input from a number of officials, including judges, prosecutors, law-enforcement, health officials and others.

"It is an amazing building," Couch said. "The size and the scope it will be able to offer in all of the things it will be able to do for the community which we did not have the ability to do.

"It is a generational game changer. It truly is."

Officials said they wanted to do tours of the building when it is finished to show the community what they could do there.

Brett Dunlap can be reached at bdunlap@newsandsentinel.com

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