the commissioners unanimously approved executing an agreement of sale<\/a> with local developer Alan Shuman, who owns the four-story, 130,000-square-foot former Wells Fargo building. The site will be used to temporarily relocate some departments to make way for a major renovation project at the historic Berks County Courthouse.<\/p>\nKevin Barnhardt, the county\u2019s chief operations officer, on Friday revealed the purchase price and cautioned that the deal is still not completely finished.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are still a few items needed \u2014 some paperwork and documents \u2014 and then we start the 45-day due diligence period,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Once that is complete, Barnhardt said, there will be 30 days before the transaction is complete.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo we are looking at tentatively mid-November we would purchase and then start to occupy the building,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Barnhardt said the county will ensure that all of the permits and documentation from the city needed to occupy the building are secured. The county is also having a mechanical engineer inspect the building.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have been through the building many times and Alan has been helpful during the process,\u201d Barnhardt said.<\/p>\n
County officials have said they will use the building at 600 Penn to house various county departments in order to address the worsening mechanical and structural issues inside the 1931 courthouse.<\/p>\n
Once the courthouse is finished, they said, the plan is to repopulate it.<\/p>\n
Barnhardt said county officials met with consultants from the Lancaster-based architectural firm Beers + Hoffman to start the process of figuring out which departments are going to be moving and where.<\/p>\n
Work on the courthouse is expected to begin next spring, Barnhardt said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are happy that we are almost at the finish line,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a really nice building that will really help us out over the next seven to 10 years as we work on the courthouse.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Berks County officials on Friday said they expect to pay $7.2 million to purchase a large property at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":275383,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[349,857,182,139,28,128,130,129,706],"class_list":["post-275382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-berks-county","tag-essential-reading","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-pennsylvania","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news","tag-top-stories-reg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275382\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}