Greg Dunn says

he is going to try and get his fellow commissioners to reconsider their

decision to re-configure commission offices to allow room for a larger

conference room.

"It's

a phenomenal waste of taxpayers' money," Dunn told The Citizen after

commissioners voted 4-1 to approve the project. "I may get voted

down again, but I'm going to have my say."

Each of the

five commissioners has a separate office in the complex, but Dunn said

two of those offices are occupied no more than an hour a week, and two

more only two or three hours. Moving the conference room will require

tearing down and rebuilding several walls and will result in some of the

commissioners' offices being increased in size as well, he said.

And he said

an estimate of $11,320 to do the work doesn't include labor costs and

may be optimistically low even for materials. "We're going to at

least get into the $25,000 range with this thing," he said, adding

he doesn't believe the project is needed.

The current

conference room gets crowded from time to time, Dunn admitted, but said

meeting room 212 is always available and will hold 50 to 60 people, or

larger meetings can simply move to the public meeting room at the east

end of the complex.

Dunn spread

his arms wide to indicate the chairman's spacious office and the commissioners'

other offices. "We have better facilities than we deserve,"

he said. "We are supposed to be fiscal conservatives here.

Plans are to

build a new administration building in a decade or so, and the current

complex already has been re-configured at least twice in the last ten

years, Dunn said. "We certainly shouldn't squander any more money

on this building."

He added that

commissioners earlier had set a priority of making more room for the county's

Human Resources Department. "They're very crowded. They have a lot

of storage of papers and now they're having to store them out in the hallway."

If any re-configuring

is done, it should be to provide relief to that department, Dunn said.

He said he

will bring the matter up for reconsideration at the commissioners' next

meeting, Feb. 28 at 7 p.m. at the County Administrative Complex.