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The floors have been polished, the cubicles have been installed and, for the most part, Frederick County Public Schools' new $16.1 million central office building at 191 S. East St. is ready for administrators to move in.

Although some parts of the new headquarters have yet to be complete, the controversial move of 250 administrators to the 90,000-square-feet building in downtown Frederick started on Wednesday and will stretch to mid-September.

The fiscal services department will be the last to move in, said Ray Barnes, the school system's director for facilities who gave the first public tour of the building on Tuesday.

"They wanted to stay in until they got through with the financial reporting for the year," Barnes said.

The first to move in was the school system technology department, which took over the second floor on Wednesday. The next to relocate will be the superintendent, her assistant, the legal services department and the school board's staff, who are moving to the top floor of the five-story building.

Featuring the superintendent's office, the top floor has attracted the most comments and speculation in the community. But according to Barnes, that floor is not too different from the corresponding spaces in the older administrative building at 115 Church St.

The only exception is the sleek high-ceiling, glass-walled room located in the tower portion of the building, which will serve as a conference and break room for staff, Barnes said.

The rest of the floor includes basic office suites and conference areas, a meeting room for the school board, and two shared bathrooms. Superintendent Linda Burgee's office is about 250 square feet, includes a small waiting room area and, like the rest of the office suites in the building, has a sink and a small size fridge.

"The room doubles as a small conference room," Barnes said. "It is actually smaller than the one she has now."

The building, which includes 15,000 square feet of undeveloped office space for future expansion, has been in the works for years and has become one of the school system's most criticized initiatives.

Plans for the new central office building date back to 2004, when school board members decided to bring all their administrators to one modern and more efficient building in downtown Frederick.

The school system will pay for the building out of the operating budget during the next 25 years.

Eventually, school officials hope to offset $8.6 million of the project's cost by selling four existing buildings — two on Hayward Road in Frederick, an office building at 115 Church St., Frederick, and an office building in Middletown. They are keeping a fifth building on Thomas Johnson Drive that serves as a warehouse.

The buildings should be going on the market this summer, but because of the state of economy, officials have no way of knowing how much they will be able to get back after the sale, Barnes said.

If the buildings are not sold, the school system will have to pay $1.1 million every year for the new building. School officials already have set aside $2 million in the fiscal 2010 budget for payments on the central office project. The first payment for the new building will be due in September.

The new central office project has met considerable resistance in the community, and even among a few school board members who have expressed concern that the school system should not have spend money on an administrative building while aging schools await renovations.

Such criticism even caused the board to consider delaying the project until the economy stabilizes and the school system's budget loosens up. But when they found that a delay in the project could mean racking up fees and penalties, the school board decided to move on with construction as planned.

The new building will be better organized, accessible for individuals with disabilities, and more energy efficient than the school system's old headquarters on Church Street and the administrative office complex at 7630 Hayward Road, which is a converted warehouse. It will allow the school system to save money on things such as old building repairs and staff mileage reimbursement, Barnes said.

School system officials in 2007 estimated that operating one central administrative building instead of five locations, would save them about $216,000 per year. Barnes however, was not able to provide an updated number for that estimate on Tuesday.

"We tried the best that we could for it not to compete with school projects," Barnes said. "Overall, it will be a great, long-term benefit for the school system."

Now that the building is almost finished, Barnes pointed out that the main goal for the new building was never to provide more luxury for administrators, but rather to make the work of administrators more efficient. It has the design of a basic office building, where most offices are 12 by 15 feet.

The new central office, for example, only has 25 separate office suites and the majority of administrators will work in cubicles. The 220 modular desk systems also were one of the few pieces of new furniture that the school system purchased for the new building, Barnes noted. The cost of cubicles was about $600,000.

Some of the chrome fridges and microwaves in the building are new, but their cost already has been factored into the total cost of the building.

Besides that, administrators will be bringing in their old computers and chairs, Barnes said.

The public also will benefit from the new building, which will for a first time will have all school administrators be accessible at the same location.

The school board's new meeting room also will be bigger and will be able to accommodate 150 people, in comparison to the old board room, which could only fit about 50 people. In terms of size, the new board room will be comparable to the commissioners' meeting room in Winchester Hall, and the school system will not be buying new flat screen TVs to equip the area as commissioners have, Barnes said. Instead, the new board room will use three drop down projector screens.

The school board also will get a new desk, instead of the horseshoe-shaped desk it has been using at Church Street. The board has only used the desk for a couple of years and when board members got it first, they said they were planning to bring it to the new central office. But now they are getting a new podium, custom-made to fit the curved shape of their new central office meeting room.

"It should be installed within the next couple of weeks," Barnes said.

E-mail Margarita Raycheva at mraycheva@gazette.net.