Hart County Expanding Storage Space for Sheriff’s Office, Government Departments

Hart County is running out of storage space.

At their meeting last week, the Board of Commissioners heard from County Administrator Terrell Partain who said the lack of storage space is becoming a problem for all departments.

“Basically, we’re out of room everywhere,” he said. “Mike needs a new cooler to keep bodies in. The voter machines need to be stored in a secured area. General government, we’re completely out of room here. And every office in this county is the same.”

One department particularly pushed to the walls is the Hart County Sheriff’s office.

Commissioners approved a plan last week to begin work on building a new storage facility for the Sheriff’s office.

The plan is to build a 60’ x 160’ foot building on a concrete slab already laid next to the Sheriff’s office. When laid years ago, the concrete slab had originally been the base for a new tax office but the building was never constructed.

At their regular meeting last week, the Board heard from Hart County Sheriff Mike Cleveland who said the vault they’re currently using to store evidence and other records is 11’ x 20’ and is completely full.

“We have a total of 250 long guns not counting the pistols. We take in about 700 pieces of evidence a year right now. So, we’ve been running out of storage forever. We’ve got a really nice vault where we are but now we’ve outgrown that,” Cleveland told the Board.

Another storage issue for the Sheriff’s office Cleveland said is storing hard copy case files.

“We have to keep hard copies of every case file we have that’s gone to court on a felony charge. We need a tremendous amount of filing cabinets; just old-timey filing cabinets. Yeah, we have it downloaded on the computer but we do have to have a hard copy,” he said. “When we got hacked into about two years it was a good thing we did have a hard copy of everything. So, we need a climate-controlled facility to store files, which is going to take up a, pretty good size room not counting the vault itself.”

Additionally, Hart County Coroner Mike Adams said his department also needs a bigger cold storage space for bodies.

After hearing from the Sheriff and Adams the Board took no vote but authorized Partain to move forward with securing plans for the new building.