By Adam Pack
The day-to-day proceedings of Ronceverte City Hall are going to be taking place out of a different building for the foreseeable future. City Administrator Pam Mentz said that Ronceverte City Hall will conduct its business out of 687 Edgar Avenue, in the building next door to The Sportsman Bar building, after standing water and black mold were found at City Hall.
According to Mentz, starting in the summer of 2021, the door to her office would not close properly, and by winter the floor was warped. Workers investigated by drilling beneath the floor of the office and found waist-deep water pooled up directly beneath Mentz’s desk. They also found large quantities of black and yellow mold. The water’s origin was two mountain springs which flow from the hillside above City Hall, which were noted on the original plans of the building, but nothing was done about it, according to Mentz.
Remediation efforts were started and finished recently, but rains since have shown that those efforts were not effective, as the water is still collecting. Add to this that other drainage and plumbing problems with the original construction of the building were revealed, and Ronceverte City Hall made the decision to move to the Edgar Avenue site “semi-permanently.”
However, this arrangement is not entirely inconvenient, as the City of Ronceverte has been attempting to purchase the building for some time. As of Tuesday, Mar. 1, all bill payments and city business will be conducted out of the Edgar Avenue site. The dropbox will remain at the original City Hall building, but Mentz reassured residents that “we’ll be walking to that dropbox multiple times a day to check it, so that will still be operational, just not in the same building as we are.”
