PARKERSBURG — Wood County officials are still trying to get the final issues resolved at the new Wood County 911 Center so the county can take full possession of the building.

Wood County 911 Director Mike Shook and Wood County Sheriff Rick Woodyard talked to the Wood County Commission Thursday about where they are at and what still needs to be done at the 18,000-square-foot facility that used to be the former Suddenlink call center building near the intersection of Interstate 77 and U.S. 50.

Shook said they did a walk through Wednesday with a Fire Marshal’s Office inspector.

County officials said they have been seeking an occupancy certificate so they can take full possession of the building, but are now being told they won’t need that since the building was a renovation of an existing building, Shook said.

“Why that all of the sudden came to light, I don’t know,” he said.

Woodyard said if they would have told them that in the beginning, it could have saved a lot of time and trouble.

“They were telling us we needed it and now we don’t need the…thing,” the sheriff said.

Officials said they have had a number of inspectors come through over the past few months who asked for different things, and officials have been trying to meet each item as different inspectors see different things.

“That was yet another inspector from the fire marshal’s office with yet another opinion,” Shook said of the inspector who walked through the building on Wednesday.

Commission President Blair Couch said he has been in contact with the West Virginia Fire Marshal Ken Tyree and other officials at the state level to try and get everything handled so the county can take possession of the building and begin setting up operations.

Originally, officials wanted to have operations set up and have the new center online sometime this spring. Shook said the new target date to have the center up and running is late May to early June.

“What I need are the email addresses and phone numbers of the people slowing us down,” Couch said. “I’ll run them.”

Commissioner Jimmy Colombo said the building was completely renovated.

“It is not the same building you walked into on the first day,” he said.

Colombo asked if someone in the fire marshal’s office had a problem with anyone out there and if that was the cause of some of the delays.

Woodyard has talked with others around the community who have done building projects that have also dealt with multiple inspectors giving contrary things that need to be done. He said he has talked with contractors around the area and these issues are some of the reasons people aren’t doing renovation work in the area.

“I have two problems with this,” Woodyard said. “When I enter in a contract with (someone) and it is in writing, that is sacred to me. It is done. Here it is, and this is what we are supposed to do.”

Woodyard was the 911 Director when the project started.

“We signed the plans and (the fire marshal’s office) signed off on them,” Woodyard said, adding the fire marshal’s office also signed off on the architect’s plans.

“At that point, everyone should be working to make sure what is in the contract is what is being met,” he said adding inspectors have been coming in and telling them things that were forgotten and needed to be added.

“They should only be checking for what is in that contract to make sure it got done,” Wood County Administrator Marty Seufer said.

Woodyard said there have been around eight separate people coming in and doing inspections with everyone seeing different things.

The sheriff said the fire marshal’s office went outside the scope of what they initially approved and came up with a number of items that were not originally covered which has caused additional work to be done in areas they thought were already finished.

911 officials said they have had contact from the Fire Marshal’s Office and that one official would be seeing the inspections to their finish.

“(Wednesday) a totally different one showed up,” Shook said.

Officials at the state level have been told to get it finished, Woodyard said.

“Now we’re being told we don’t need a (occupancy) certificate since it is a renovation,” he said. “I have never seen anything like this.

“I am hearing it from everyone that tries to do business. We aren’t the only ones.”

Messages were left with the West Virginia Fire Marshal’s Office, but no one was able to respond Thursday due to wildfires occurring in the eastern part of the state.

Brett Dunlap can be reached at bdunlap@newsandsentinel.com