HCHD building has first residents in EMA
Holmes County Emergency Planning Agency Director Jason Troyer, left, and Assistant Director Jordan Tschiegg relax in their new digs in the Holmes County Health Department building on Glen Drive in Millersburg. They are the first occupants of the new building.
While the Holmes County Health District is not yet ready to move into the new Holmes County Health District building on Glen Drive in Millersburg, the facility does have one county department that has taken over the vacancy.
The Holmes County Emergency Management Agency became the new building’s first tenants, moving in Saturday, July 20 with Director Jason Troyer and Assistant Director Jordan Tschiegg making themselves at home in their respective offices.
“It’s going to be great, a huge upgrade for us in terms of how we can operate more efficiently,” Troyer said.
According to Troyer, their new digs should create a much more conducive work environment than what they had at the Old Jail in Historic Downtown Millersburg.
While they now have much more space to operate, the new facility provides several key benefits for the EMA.
The first and perhaps most important is the sheer space being made available to all parties moving into the facility.
“The biggest thing is that we now have everything in one location under one roof,” Troyer said, “from our offices to our stockpile and actually our shelter area for emergency situations. That is incredibly important to us logistically because we don’t have to have people at four or five different sites.”
The other huge advantage is EMA will soon be interconnected with the Holmes County Health Department, which may not seem like a huge deal, but it certainly is for both parties.
“People may not realize how closely we work together and mirror each other,” Troyer said. “A lot of our plans mirror each other, and now it’s going to be very easy for us to simply walk upstairs and meet with the various health department officials we deal with on a regular basis.”
The two main cogs of the health department are emergency preparedness and environmental health agency personnel. The EMA works closely with Sarah Burkholder of the health department, with Burkholder serving as the chair for the Holmes County Local Emergency Planning Committee.
Troyer said in addition, the EMA now has access to conference rooms, allowing him and Tschiegg to easily create community training sessions the EMA hopes to invest more time into now that they have the proper facility to do so. That would include providing CPR classes to churches and other groups.
“We have space to do a lot more of those types of things, which is going to be very beneficial for not just us, but for the community,” Troyer said. “We can also have more regional classes for both the EMA and health department.”
The health department continues to wait for the arrival of new furniture, and because it is a much bigger operation with many more working parts and personnel, it should be sometime in late September before it is ready to move in.
“We’re hoping to be able to make the move all at once,” Burkholder said. “We’re hoping to do the whole thing over a two-day period, but it shouldn’t affect the flow of work. Our hope is that we will be closed on a Thursday and Friday and ready to roll then when Monday comes around.”
Holmes County commissioner Dave Hall said officials from several county departments have done walk-throughs to pinpoint any changes or repair minor flaws.
“We’re excited to have this opportunity finally taking place,” Hall said. “It’s an important step for our county.”