Potted plants were neatly positioned on the windowsill of Laura Hosie’s office Tuesday afternoon, and a framed family photo was resting on her desk exactly where she liked it.
Her computer monitors had been adjusted to just the right height and angle. Her desk drawers were slowly being filled with everything she needs to do her job.
There were still a few unpacked boxes sitting on the floor, but for the most part she was well on her way to being settled in. And that made her pretty happy.
“It’s all coming together,” she said with a smile.
Hosie was one of 16 Berks County Planning Commission employees making the move Tuesday from their old office on the 14th floor of the Berks County Services Center in downtown Reading to their new home at the county’s South Campus.
The site includes nearly 105,000 square feet of office and warehouse space along East Wyomissing Avenue in Mohnton. The county commissioners voted in 2021 to lease the property from the Berks County Nonprofit Development Corporation, which purchased the building for about $5.4 million.
The property at 400 E. Wyomissing Ave. was previously the home of GAI-Tronics.
The planning department was the first of six county departments being relocated from the services center to the sprawling facility in an effort to improve efficiency in county government.
The six offices being moved are planning, assessment, mapping, the workforce development board, the industrial development authority and the area agency of aging.
The move is expected to continue for about four weeks through the first week in May.
“It’s a big move, but it’s been a long time coming,” Berks County Chief Operations Officer Kevin Barnhardt said at a commissioners meeting this month. “We think it’s really going to enhance those services.”
Commissioners Chairman Christian Leinbach noted that these are some of the first pieces of the puzzle to be moved over the next five years as a result of a space allocation study completed by the county.
“This will result in greater efficiency of the space that we have, and hopefully greater efficiency within a variety of departments that are getting reconfigured and, in some cases, moved to entirely new areas,” he said.
David Hunter, director of the planning commission, said he is happy with his department’s new home.
“We love it,” he said of the new space. “It’s nice and bright. It’s more accessible and more modern than the office we were in before.”
The new office features a common area with large tables and a kitchenette, as well as 16 glass-walled offices. On Tuesday the space still carried the smell of newly-laid carpet and fresh paint as employees quickly filled it with desks, chairs and computers.
“We had been preparing for this move for months,” Hunter said. “This has been a really clean transition and went faster than I think we had anticipated.”
Source: Berkshire mont