WCCED moves down the street to a familiar building
Dan Reitz and his staff have a different view of the workday world.
“All of our employees now have windows,” said the executive director of Washington County Council on Economic Development, in full chuckle.
The agency moved into its new ho-ho-home just before Christmas, relocating from the lower level of Citizens Bank at 40 S. Main St. to the restored Baltimore & Ohio train station at 273 S. Main, both in downtown Washington.
Since the Dec. 22 switch, WCCED was operating in the space occupied by Washington County Tourism Promotion Agency for more than 13 years. Tourism merged with Washington County Chamber of Commerce a little more than a year ago, with the revised chamber moving from Washington to Southpointe shortly thereafter.
Reitz’s agency is certainly familiar with the new digs. It owned the place since 1997, and spent about $1.1 million restoring the structure.
The transition was semi-rocky. Only the primarily phone line – 724-225-8223 – was functional and the offices, with two major holidays in between, in physical disarray.
“Hopefully, the phones will be fixed tomorrow,” Reitz said Thursday. “We’re still unpacking, too. There will be a lot of purging of files. You don’t know what you have until have to move it.
“But we’re getting there. I would say give us another week.”
WCCED has four full-time employees and two consultants working there, along with 2-1/2 employees of University of Pittsburgh Small Business Development Center. The people there have more windows from which to glimpse sunshine, snow squalls and heavily bundled pedestrians than they previously had.
Reitz, however, is quick to point out WCCED was not windowless at the bank and appreciated its time there.
“We enjoyed our time with Citizens Bank,” he said. “We moved there in January 2002, and they’ve been great to work with. They were nice to us.”
The agency, formed in 1989, is responsible for development at Starpointe business park in Hanover and Smith townships and handles Small Business Administration loans for Southwestern Pennsylvania and northern West Virginia.
The train station is believed to have been built in the 1880s, but was unused for decades before being restored. An arson fire, which destroyed the roof, delayed completion until the latter half of 2001. Tourism was the only previous tenant in the rebuilt structure.
Now Economic Development is all aboard, and Reitz is pleased.
“It’s fun to be in the old train station.”