Rensselaer County Office Building moves to East Greenbush

EAST GREENBUSH — The new Rensselaer County Office Building is on Route 4 in East Greenbush, right off Exit 8 in the old Rose & Kiernan building.

Monday was the first day in the new space. People are still unpacking and settling in. There’s still a lot of construction going on.

The fourth floor of the new building now houses finance, budget, and tax services, along with administration.

A space on the first floor will eventually be another DMV, with plenty of parking.

Another area under construction is slated to be the new home next month of the Rensselaer County Legislature.

The old county office building in downtown Troy is getting renovated and will house Social Services by the end of the year.

“And Child Protective will be in there. Next door to that will be Probation, so that has its own building,” said Rensselaer County Executive Steve McLaughlin. “I was never comfortable with Probation and Social Services being in the same building, using the same elevator. I was never happy with that situation, but again, it’s something that we inherited, and we’re fixing all of that. And then when people see the senior center that we’re building in Troy, which is really at College Station across the street from the county building, they’re going to be pretty amazed at that. It’s probably the nicest senior center in the state of New York when it’s all done. It’s beautiful.”

Social Services are currently in Flanigan Square on River Street– a lease the county executive says he inherited that costs $1.2 million a year.

“It made no sense to me to be paying rent on services that we are always going to provide as a county,” he said.

Things will look very different in a year.

“So we have between this building, the two buildings there that we have, we’re renovating the interior of the courthouse, we’re building a brand-new state of the art senior center, we renovated our records storage building, and we have an emergency services training center about to come on line– it’s about $70 million worth of construction. And very very little of it was bonded. Most of it was done with cash, with a surplus we had built up over the past four years and with energy performance contracts,” said McLaughlin.

“The county has always had space that is just like: here’s your space, make it work. Now this gives us the opportunity to redesign our space for today’s workforce and for today’s public, and bring everything up to today’s standards, everything from Wi-Fi and IT, to just the way people can access services. The existing building was just tired, and it needed to be renovated, and the ability for us to buy this building gave us the opportunity to renovate that building as well, so it’s really a great thing for the county.”