County Council to move to €40m offices

Westmeath County Council is poised to relocate to new €40m offices, bringing some 200 staff who are currently working from nine different offices in Mullingar under the one roof. The move to the new premises - due in May - won"t come a day too soon, as far as Council officials are concerned. The new building is over four floors which all look down over the large glass-fronted reception area, which itself looks towards the existing Council buildings. The current County Building which houses the Arts Centre and the County Council members" chamber, will be linked to the new offices The reception area will be home to two of the Council"s busiest offices - motor tax and housing, as well as to the customer services desk. '90 per cent of our footfall is for those offices,' says Roibeard O Ceallaigh, Senior Executive Officer with the Council As well as the offices, there will be several meeting rooms provided - something the council staff is really looking forward to. 'We used up meeting rooms all the time, so it should be a huge saving in terms of efficiency,' says Roibeard. There will also be meeting rooms for each of the political parties represented on the County Council; and there are training rooms for Council staff as well. In line with today"s 'green' thinking, there are a lot of energy saving measures in place in the new building, the chief one being that except in the rooms that house the council"s computer servers, there will be no air conditioning. '95 per cent of the building is ventilated naturally,' says Roibeard. 'No part of the building is greater than 13 metres deep, so ventilation will keep the air fresh. 'We have heaters, but they will only be on for a limited amount of time. For the rest, we"ll be using passive heat and heat recovery methods,' he says, explaining that this will involve 're-use' of the heat generated through the presence of people in rooms, and the heat generated from computers and so on. The building will be completely accessible, and so too, for the first time, will be the Council Chambers. The Council is delighted with progress on the County Buildings. It was only in 2003/2004 that the Council started seeking a design/build contractor for the project, and construction by the local firm, Bennett Construction (of which Bennett Developments is a division) got underway in June 2007.