SNOW HILL | It’s still not home, but it’s the next best thing.
The Greene County Clerk of Court office, displaced into a cramped magistrate’s office for about four weeks after two fires, has settled into a larger space with the Register of Deeds office on the first floor.
The move took place on May 28, said Clerk of Superior Court Sandra Beaman.
“Substantially better ... “ is how she described the new area on Monday. “We have actually consolidated all of the offices down to these three areas.”
What was once Sheriff’s and N.C. Highway Patrol offices became the Register of Deeds offices after the 2011 renovations.
The Register of Deeds has temporarily given up its indexing room, map room and Registrar Nancy Murphy’s office, consolidating them into one room to allow space for the clerk’s office, Beaman said.
The records are still stored in the smoke-damaged clerk’s office, up one level in the building.
“We have access to all of my records and everything which are still located in the clerk’s office upstairs,” Beaman said. “... The worst problem is all the records that are in that old office are damaged due to soot.”
Overall, the conditions are better in the new temporary location than in the magistrate’s office where six employees shared work stations with the magistrate employees, and electrical outlets were limited.
Beaman said a crew has demolished and cleaned the clerk’s office, but she doesn’t know how long it will take to restore and rewire it so she and her staff can move back.
“The entire second floor of the courthouse is being rewired,” she said.
Not all of the wiring had been replaced in the former clerk’s office in 2010-11 when the last restorations were made, Beaman said.
“This courthouse was remodeled twice in the 70s,” she said, referring to 1970-71 and about 1977-78.
Most of the pending case folders that were destroyed have been recreated — a work in progress, Beaman said.
A fire started around a portable heater on Feb. 20, and a second fire, of which the cause was deemed undetermined but is believed to have started around the old wiring, broke out April 24. After the second fire, the clerk’s office was moved to the magistrate’s office.
On March 17, an electrical fire broke out in the Greene County Probation and Parole and N.C. Highway Patrol offices, located behind the courthouse. Then on June 1, someone broke the glass at the courthouse entrance and tried to set a fire inside. However, the fire burned itself out.
County Manager Kyle DeHaven said the county’s insurance is paying for the damages, but he doesn’t have the total cost as of yet. For now, the focus is on repairing the buildings and getting the clerk’s office back on the second floor. There’s no news about the investigation.
“The SBI came and did some research, they did some investigating,” he said, “but I haven’t heard any conclusion or response from them.”
Margaret Fisher can be reached at 252-559-1082 or Margaret.Fisher@Kinston.com. Follow her on Twitter @MargaretFishr.