This Friday, July 12, will be the Preble County Board of Elections’ last day at its current location in the Preble County Courthouse on Main Street. The office will close that day and the move will begin to the new BOE space in the county-owned Junction Village Mall, located just across the North Barron Street railroad crossing. The office at the courthouse will close on Friday, but BOE staff’s phones will still be reachable. Beginning Monday, July 15, the public should visit the new office for any election-related business.
Eddie Mowen Jr. | The Register-Herald
EATON — This Friday, July 12, will be the Preble County Board of Elections’ last day at its current location in the Preble County Courthouse on Main Street.
The office will close that day and the move will begin to the new BOE space in the county-owned Junction Village Mall, located just across the North Barron Street railroad crossing.
The office at the courthouse will close on Friday, but BOE staff’s phones will still be reachable. Beginning Monday, July 15, the public should visit the new office for any election-related business.
“Our IT company is going to come in on the 12th, remove things from the rack in there, essentially shutting us down, and then bringing that stuff over,” PC Board of Elections Director Lisa Boggs said of the BOE’s server and computers. “We will then pack up our desks and our computers and bring them up here. That brings us back up on Monday the 15th at least to work.”
Board of Elections officials are also coordinating the moving of the voting equipment to the new space.
“Our phones, kind of will be some there, some here, and but people can still get hold of us. And then it’s kind of a gradual thing to start — when the security system goes live, and the cameras go live, and then we’re officially here. All the secure stuff will be here,” she added.
The BOE looked at various locations and planned for a move for several years. “Maintenance has done a great job, and the company that has been doing the drawings,” Boggs said. There is actually a lot of space at the new building, and a secure area for the voting equipment, she explained.
There is a community meeting room in the building the BOE will be utilizing for early voting and poll worker training.
“I think it’s it’s very nice,” Boggs said of the new BOE Office. “It’s going to be nice to be on one level. Once we get everything over here, I think we can work smarter because we’re not on three separate levels of the courthouse, with the machines downstairs and secured storage up on four, and people cramped. We’ll have plenty of desk space.
“We have plenty of room and we have some storage that we’re going to put back in the back, our ADA equipment and some of our voting booths that go out to the polling locations,” she noted.
According to Boggs, the board is considering hosting an open house event once the move is complete, to show off the new space to the public.
Reach Eddie Mowen Jr. at 937-683-4061 and follow on X @emowenjr.
