MCJFS Looking To Build Resource Room

Muskingum County Jobs and Family Services met with the County Commissioners Monday afternoon.

The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the creation of a resource room in their current building. We spoke to Randy L. Cochrane, Director of the organization who told us the room would feature 14 computers where customers can come and apply for their benefits online, rather than face to face. Cochrane explained other goals they had in building the room.

“What we’d like to do is be able to have this resource room available where individuals could come in in the future and if they want to do a tax return through one of the free tax return site they could actually use the room for that. We will have handicapped accessibility for for individuals. We are going to start with the Medicaid applications online and eventually we’ll roll this out over the next 12 to 16 months to include both the food stamp and the cash assistance population.”

Cochrane believes it will be a great benefit and convenience factor for the clients. Cochrane explained how the project would be funded.

“We had an architect, Pat Kelly from Kelly Architects work up some numbers for us. We’re thinking the project is going to come in somewhere around $23,000. Because this a construction project on the building, its owned by the commissioners. They would be responsible for paying the up front costs and then we can reimburse them over the useful life ofthe building. In this case its going to be about 12 years.”

Cochrane says the plan moving forward is to get approval from the commissioners, put the project out to bid and hopefully by the end of March or early April, start the construction. The project should only take a matter of weeks.