Sometimes it seems that even the most obvious background needs to be repeated to remind some officials of the basic facts of local government.
Here’s a short tutorial on Alamance County and Graham history:
- Alamance County was established in 1849, carved out of what was then a larger Orange County.
- A site in the center of the new county was named Graham and established as the county seat. (There was no pre-existing town here; rather it was established “from scratch,” and laid out with a courthouse in the center of the new seat of government.)
- Part of the justification for the new county, and the location of the new county seat, was that people in the western hinterlands of Orange County were having to travel too far to go to court or handle and deal with other, basic government functions – like paying taxes.
One hundred and seventy-five years later, Graham is still the center of the county, and is thus centrally located for all the government services that Alamance County’s residents might need.
So, we don’t know why some county officials would get the notion that some of the county’s offices could or should be moved to Burlington.
Graham’s fundamental purpose for existence was – and to some extent, remains – to serve as the county seat of county government.
But various proposals floated this week to the county’s commissioners seemed to suggest that some county functions could just as easily be relocated to county-owned buildings in Burlington – or perhaps to locations outside of downtown Graham that aren’t even owned by the county.
One of the most bizarre options tossed out this week was to have the county completely abandon its administrative annex at the corner of Maple and Elm streets in downtown Graham and turn it over in its entirety for the court system’s use. The county’s s displaced staff would then be dispatched en masse to a former elderly services building on Martin Street in Burlington (does anyone even know where that is?).
The monetary cost for renovating the elderly services building and upgrading the annex to fit the court system’s needs was estimated to be $4 to $5 million.
But the costs to residents, in terms of inconvenience, would be astronomical.
Meanwhile, one commissioner, Pam Thompson, suggested that the courts, themselves, could be moved out of downtown Graham to provide them with more room to grow.
Neither option is necessary or prudent at all. These proposals for moving any functions of county government out of Graham don’t deserve any serious consideration.
Graham is not so crowded that there is not room for additional county office buildings in the city.
It also seems that more emphasis needs to be put on dual uses of space.
We don’t really understand, for instance, the board chairman’s aversion to using the empty, unused commissioner meeting chambers for small claims court one day a week.
It seems to us that room might well be suitable for the much-debated relocation of the jury lounge, which the county’s administrators are angling to move out of the criminal courts building. The commissioners use their meeting chambers only once a month in the morning and once a month at night. The planning board and others periodically use it only at night, while the county’s board of equalization and review could readily find other venues for hearing property tax appeals.
We wonder if there aren’t already some other unused, or increased use, or dual use.
For instance, the county has inherited a former state “prison farm” in Graham and actually used it as a jail annex several years ago. But as far as we know, the facility is now vacant. (There’s something particularly appropriate, it seems to us, to use a former prison for some of the county’s offices – for instance, equal size “offices” could be made from the former prison cells.)
We’re also wondering if everyone is counting correctly. The county is about to get a fifth district court judge – which, granted, could necessitate an additional courtroom. We also have two superior court judges (who need courtrooms of their own). That’s a total of seven courtrooms.
And the county has seven courtrooms – three in the Judge J.B. Allen, Jr. Court House; three in the so-called civil court annex next to the county’s headquarters; and a premier venue in the Historic Court House. Why the county could need more than these seven is something we’ve never been able to figure out.
Most of the time, from our observation, the current courtrooms are not even being used for full, 8-hour days. It’s not unusual on Thursday afternoons and Fridays for the courtrooms to be predominantly vacant.
And here’s a novel idea – albeit one that no bureaucrat would ever conceive – let’s re-examine whether the county really needs all of the bureaucrats who are taking up space in its buildings and requiring ever-expanding office space to house them.
At any rate, there are plenty of options for housing government operations in Graham that don’t require scattering county functions across multiple, unknown locations outside of the county seat.
County officials need to redouble their efforts to find reasonable, common-sense approaches for meeting the county’s real space needs.
