MORGANTOWN — It looks like the Monongalia County Commission and Morgantown City Council are going to be roommates!
Kinda.
A Wednesday afternoon work session ended with the commission agreeable to providing its meeting chambers and support space to the city for public meetings during the extensive renovations coming to Morgantown City Hall.
Assistant City Manager Emily Muzzarelli said the meetings could make the move to the Monongalia County Courthouse as early as next month, though city hall construction is anticipated to begin in August and last about a year.
The city is planning to conduct at least six monthly meetings in commission chambers, including city council (3) and one meeting each of the city’s board of zoning appeals, land reuse and preservation agency and planning commission.
“Any other place we were looking at; we talked about the Met Theatre, Marilla [Center], the airport. But everything is, you have to set it all up and take it all down — the microphones, the cameras,” Muzzarelli said. “We felt this was as close to what we have now with as little work as possible. And people are at least already used to coming downtown. They can park in the same place and we can have signs directing people here.”
According to Muzzarelli, the city will contract separately with WEST TV, which handles audio and video recording and livestreaming for commission meetings.
While the initial plan is to simply record the city meetings for later playback on Channel 15 and upload to the city’s website, discussions are still underway about potentially livestreaming the meetings to a platform like YouTube, which the county began doing during COVID-19.
The only real questions remaining pertain to security.
Muzzarelli said the city will work with the sheriff’s department on how best to handle those details and is willing to discuss reimbursing the county for overtime costs incurred by the sheriff’s department.
In other county news, the commission approved an additional $25,000 for the Visit Mountaineer Country CVB’s Tourism Advancement Fund.
The fund is a grant process launched in the summer of 2021 aimed at attracting events to the area and kick-starting the county’s post-lockdown economy.
Commissioner Sean Sikora said this funding is in addition to the $150,000 already committed by the commission and another $25,000 by the CVB’s board of directors.
“Just to confirm this, at the minimum, for every dollar we spend is a five-to-one return as far as activity in our county. I think it’s well-invested dollars,” he said.
Also on Wednesday, the commission approved a proposal from Innerface Architectural Signage for $21,445.87 to update the signage throughout the courthouse in light of the many office relocations and renovations in recent years.
Lastly, the commission met Angela Hinerman, the new superintendent of Mason-Dixon Historical Park.
Hinerman will earn $35,000 annually to run the facility and will live in the house on park property.
