by Hilary Butschek | East Cobb Neighbor |
MARIETTA — One of the two buildings of the Cobb & Douglas Public Health Department’s Marietta center opened Thursday after a $3.9 million renovation.
The renovated 45,000-square-foot building houses the public health departments that protect the county by controlling the spread of disease and virus outbreaks and provides free education programs for women raising their newborns.
The new building was called “beautiful” by Brenda Fitzgerald, Georgia Department of Public Health commissioner, several times during a tour of the facility Thursday.
After 18 months of construction the renovation of Building B is complete. That building sits adjacent to a second building, Building A, on County Services Parkway.
The money for renovating Building B came from 2011 special purpose local options sales tax funds, said Virgil Moon, Cobb & Douglas Public Health administration director.
Building B houses several programs to help mothers and babies, including Women, Infants and Children, Children First and Early Intervention and Child Medical Services. All the programs offer educational material and help for parents with newborns, said Lisa Crossman, deputy director of Cobb and Douglas Public Health.
Crossman said the new facilities help parents know they’re being taken care of. Crossman said the old WIC center was 5,000 square feet, but the new building is 20,000 square feet.
“Before we had so little space that everyone was crowded in. Babies were crawling over each other, and it was cramped,” Crossman said.
Crossman said before the renovation, the different departments of the public health center were spread out in multiple facilities across the county that the health department leased.
“This shows our pregnant women and mothers more respect, and also, we can take that money that we were using to pay leases and put that back into our programs,” Crossman said.
The public health department houses disease prevention, restaurant inspections, emergency preparedness and a tuberculosis clinic.
Jack Kennedy, district health director with Cobb and Douglas Public Health, said he enjoyed walking through the facilities and seeing how much the employees and patients welcomed the improvement.
“In our previous spaces we had crowded waiting rooms and outdated facilities. As much growth as there is in the county and as much as the population has expanded, it was needed. The facilities are just as spectacular as you’ve ever seen,” Kennedy said.
The renovation of Building B is not yet complete. Within the next year the outside of the building will get a renovation when the metal siding is removed and a brick exterior replaces it.
That will cost $500,000, in addition to the $3.9 million already spent, that will come from the 2016 SPLOST, Moon said.
More updates are planned for the facilities. Building A is set to receive a $2.4 million renovation paid for by 2016 SPLOST funds, Moon said. That renovation is set to be complete in the next year, Crossman said.
The updates to the facilities come just after Cobb and Douglas Public Health was named the first public health department in the state to receive accreditation from the national Public Health Accreditation Board.
It is one of only 75 facilities in the U.S. to receive the status.
Fitzgerald commended the department for its work in the past year to control an outbreak of tuberculosis in local schools.
“Cobb and Douglas is doing a great job. The majority of the (tuberculosis) cases in Georgia are coming from people who are from other countries. I’ve been looking at the stats, and Cobb and Douglas is way down,” Fitzgerald said.