“We all made a conscious decision that since we’re getting kicked out of this room for the time being, we thought we would take the show on the road to the communities so that we are going where the folks are,” Chairwoman Niki Conrad said. “That’ll be exciting for us.”

In the coming weeks, the second floor offices — Recorder’s Office, Assessor’s Office and the Board of Supervisors — will be vacating their regular spaces and moving downstairs. The Auditor’s Office will remain in its second floor home until the second week of December.

Meetings are regularly scheduled every other Tuesday at 10 a.m. The October meetings are Oct. 10 and 24. The locations are still being finalized, but they will be announced on the official Webster County Facebook page and in The Messenger.

The board’s day-to-day activities will move to the first floor conference room of the Courthouse.

- Messenger photo by Bill Sgea The alley behind the Webster County Courthouse is closed due to the ongoing work to replace the heating, ventilation and air conditioning system in the courthouse.

Webster County Recorder Lindsay Laufersweiler also noted during Tuesday’s meeting that her office will be moving on Oct. 5 to the first floor where the Webster County Treasurer’s Office is normally located. The Treasurer’s Office, along with Planning and Zoning, has moved to the old bank building on 723 First Ave. S., until the HVAC construction is complete.

“The plan is to be out through the month of October, all of November and the first week of December,” Laufersweiler said.

During this time, the Assessor’s Office will move to the regular Planning and Zoning office space on the courthouse’s first floor.

Though the Recorder’s Office will be moving downstairs, its vault of records will remain where it is. The vault will be accessible to staff for just one hour per day, Laufersweiler said.

Laufersweiler said they will be moving 86 vital records books and 161 index books into the temporary space on the first floor, as well as some search terminals to make locating documents in the vault more efficient.

Back in early 2022, the county’s land records dating back about 150 years were digitized as part of a $300,000 project funded by a grant through the American Rescue Plan Act. The image files of those roughly 442,000 pages of documents have been processed and organized over the last 18 months and are expected to be finalized soon, which will also help minimize the need to go into the vault, Laufersweiler said.