COQUILLE — Mary Ann Sackett is ready to move.

Sackett, the Coos County Veterans’ Service coordinator, has been working out of the county’s annex in Coquille for 16 years with the expectation of moving out of the aging building for a majority of them.

“They’ve been telling me for 15 years we were going to move,” Sackett said.

That day will come soon.

The county is nearing completion on a upgrade and remodel on the more than 15,000 square-foot Pincinatti building, at the corner of Secondand North Adams streets. The county acquired the building in 1986 and started working on it in spurts in 1992. Sixteen years after work on the new office space started, the building is scheduled to open on June 13. The departments working out of the annex — the county planning, veterans services and county water resources departments — will be moving in at the end of June.

The long wait was a result of tight budgets, which stopped the work in the late 1990s, Coos County Commissioner Kevin Stufflebean said. Until this spring, the building sat half completed.

After Congress approved a one-year extension of county timber reimbursement payments, Kevin Stufflebean urged the other commissioners to join him in approving budgeting $500,000 to finish the job.  The actual cost should be closer to $450,000, Stufflebean said.

Dave Voyles, the county’s maintenance manager, said the county replaced the roof, heating and cooling system, electrical system and outlined the design of the planning department’s space in the 1990s. In this latest surge of activity, carpenters replaced old siding, leaking windows and finished the interior. Crews still need to paint and apply some finishing touches to keep the move-in date on track.

Stufflebean feared waiting much longer to remodel the Pincinatti building would end up costing more and jumped at the chance to get it done this year.

“At the time, construction costs were going up pretty drastically,” he said. “We were fortunate that construction costs have leveled off.”

With the 8,500 square-foot Coquille Annex being cleared out, Voyles isn’t spending as much time  keeping it operational. The heating system was a constant challenge. Even when it worked, the inefficient building design — it was originally a furniture store built in 1949 — and huge first floor windows made a day with the heaters running hot seem cold.

“It’s just all open from the floor all the way to the ceiling,” Voyles said.

Electrical issues and power surges caused heating coils to burn out and now the system isn’t on at all.

Sackett, for one, is glad the heating system and its fans are no longer working. The fans would pick up mold from the basement and distribute it throughout the building, and also blow around thick black dust.

That was in addition to covering desks with plastic sheets to prevent water from the leaking roof from damaging computers and drowning paperwork.

The ceiling does more than leak, it drops pieces of plaster damaged by water.

“It’s not a very pleasant place to work,” Sackett said.

Voyles has more than falling plaster on his mind. He worries that the whole roof may fall if a significant earthquake were to strike Coquille.

“I don’t think it would take very much of a seismic trembler to bring her down,” he said.

Cables and huge turnbuckles in the attic are responsible for holding the roof together, he said.

“You go up there and twist it up as much as you can.”

What bothers him the most is the potential for roof collapse. The design on the building and its poor condition could cause weight bearing walls to fall in opposite directions. One wall would fall east and the other west. Then the roof, lacking support, would fall on top of whatever — and whomever— was in the building.

The fate of the Coquille Annex is yet to be determined. Stufflebean said if another timber payment extension is approved, the county might demolish the building. If not, it could be auctioned in the county’s annual land sale. Most of the problems are isolated in one section of the building. Another possibility is tearing down or selling the problem section and keeping the portion in better shape for conference and meeting rooms, something Stufflebean says the county facilities lack.

Moving out of the annex is the first part of an effort to keep county buildings in decent shape. Stufflebean said the Coos County Courthouse and North Bend Annex also need attention.

But for now, he is satisfied with providing employees a place that doesn’t feature plastic tarps and raining plaster.

“I feel bad for employees having to work in that environment,” Stufflebean said. “I think it is a positive move.”