Officials from the Tooele County Health Department were finally able to celebrate the completion of their new, $5.5 million facility on Main Street with an open house on Tuesday.

The newer building, which was anticipated to be fully completed in June 2007, opened for business last November, although portions of it were still incomplete or under-equipped. On Tuesday, it opened in full with tours for the public, refreshments and prize drawings.

Myron Bateman, director of the Tooele County Health Department, said the county's rapid growth was the primary reason why the new building was needed.

"As Tooele County grows, the health needs of our citizens and the environment grows, and the expansion of our building allows our employees the necessary office and classroom space to meet these demands," he said. "For years now, we have struggled with too little office space, exam rooms and classrooms, and it made it difficult to have any continuity in providing our services to the public. We anticipate that the features involved with this expansion project will help our community in many ways."

Kathy Taylor, chairperson for the Tooele County Board of Health, said Bateman was the key force in getting the new building underway.

"This expansion project was Myron's dream and his vision, and he has done a lot of great things for the community through this and his work as health officer," she said. "None of us dreamed that we would ever outgrow the old building [built in 1996], but Myron knew that we would eventually need it because of the county's growth."

The new building includes a low-income dental clinic and a department emergency operations center, while the number of offices and exam or conference rooms for clients has nearly been doubled. Bucky Whitehouse, health department public information officer, said the size of the overall building has also doubled.

"The size of our entire facility went from about 27,000 square feet to 54,000 square feet," he said. "We also went from two or three staff members per office to each staff member being able to have their own office space."

Another new addition includes a nurse's work center, which is used for local school nurses to take care of work and school plans and guide student interns. The office space consists of six school nurses, including three who work exclusively with schools, and three who work with both school and community health.

"We also work with student interns who will follow us and determine if they want to go into community nursing, and there are students from colleges all around Utah who come here," said full-time community nurse Valorie Coesens.

Available office space and classrooms for both the health department programs and USU extension programs has also been expanded, and the building now has 10 meeting rooms altogether. Some of the non-profit groups utilizing the rooms include the Grantsville Soil Conservation District and the USU Master Gardener Program, while USU extension classes in marriage enrichment, landscape design and nutrition also take place there during various times of the day.

"We've actually been really busy with non-profit organizations meeting here, and it's nice to be able to have so many classes and meetings going on at once," said USU Extension Agent Linden Greenhalgh. "Some nights we've been completely maxed out as far as room availability goes. In the old building we used to just have the auditorium and two classrooms."

Bateman said that with Tooele County's high growth rate, he now hopes that the new health department facility will have the capacity to handle the growing number of residents in need of its services.

"Tooele County is expected to grow to 190,000 people in the next 15 years, and the idea is that this building will be big enough to support our staff until 2023." he said. "We may then set up satellite offices or branches of the health department in other parts of the county. I had always said, 'Let's build it with an eye to the future.'"

dougrad@tooeletranscript.com