The City of West Chester will be improving their city hall to be more accessible to people with disabilities.

The West Chester City Hall has been housed in an old bus barn for about 30 years, and City Clerk Sue Janecek says not much has been changed to the building since they moved in. West Chester received an $18,875 grant from the Washington County Riverboat Foundation to make improvements to the building.

Janecek describes some of the planned improvements, “The most of it will be the restroom. Our restroom meets several of the ADA requirements, but we found out that the sink does not and the hand rails do not. Our city hall is in what was Mid-Prairie’s old bus barn when West Chester’s school was operating. So they basically took a corner, put a stool, a sink, and a wall. It doesn’t even have a ceiling in it. We decided we needed a nice restroom, especially we should have had it last year when RAGBRAI went through, because we had a lot of meetings and a lot of people in there.”

They plan to expand the size of the restroom, install a portable hot water heater, and construct another cement ramp to the city hall’s doors to make it wheelchair accessible. Janecek says these improvements will be great for the different organizations that meet in the City Hall. Janecek says it’s been a community effort, as the city matched a $2000 grant from the First Responders, and she says she expects a donation from the West Chester Lion’s Club. Janecek anticipates the improvements to be done by the fall.