Alamance County’s commissioners have decided to turn part of a county office building into a temporary gathering place for prospective jurors as they struggle to relieve an impending space crunch that faces the local court system.
During a regularly-scheduled meeting on Tuesday, the commissioners voted 4-to-1 to set up this jury lounge within a conference room that dominates a so-called county administrative annex at 201 West Elm Street in Graham.
In the short-term, this lounge will co-exist with the county’s planning and inspection departments, which currently inhabit most of the administrative annex. The commissioners have nevertheless agreed to relocate these two functions to a now-vacant county-owned building along Burlington’s Martin Street that will first have to be refurbished.
The commissioners have agreed to let the court system use the county’s administrative annex as a stopgap while it constructs a $37 million expansion of the Judge J.B. Allen, Jr. Court House. This project will ultimately provide four extra courtrooms and additional office space for the local court system, whose already tight quarters are predicted to burst on January 1 when the county adds a fifth district judge to the four that it already has on the bench.
The creation of a jury lounge within the county’s administrative annex has seen some resistance from the local court system’s movers and shakers, who have raised some concerns about security as well as the dispersal of court system functions.
“This is a compromise that works in the short term as we move to a permanent solution. This is not a great option . . . There’s not a great option for courts. But I think this is the best bad option.”
– County commissioner Craig Turner
A majority of the commissioners nevertheless accepted this proposal on Tuesday in preference to two other options that called for equally significant shakeups to the court system and the county’s own operations.
“This is a compromise that works in the short term as we move to a permanent solution,” commissioner Craig Turner declared before that morning’s 4-to-1 vote. “This is not a great option…There’s not a great option for courts. But I think this is the best bad option.”
The option that Turner and his colleagues ultimately embraced is an admittedly oblique solution to the space shortage caused by the county’s newest district court judge.
According to county officials, the new judge will initially preside over an existing courtroom that’s currently used for small claim cases. The commissioners have previously agreed to cede their own meeting chambers one day a week to accommodate these small claims through the end of the year.
On January 1, however, those cases will be moved to the current jury lounge within the Allen courthouse. A portion of that space will continue to serve as a lounge for jurors who’ve been impaneled for trials. In the meantime, jurors who’ve not yet been selected for particular cases will be dispatched to the administrative annex – at least until the county completes work on a new lounge as part of the Allen building’s aforementioned expansion.
This veritable game of musical chairs will coincide with an equally dizzying transition for the county’s own planning and inspections staffs. Under the plan which the commissioners accepted on Tuesday, these two departments will momentarily cohabitate with the court system’s new jury lounge while the county renovates its former elderly services building along Martin Street.
Brian Baker, one of the county’s assistant managers, told the commissioners that the overhaul of this dilapidated structure will ultimately account for much of his anticipated price tag of $4 to $5 million for this particular plan to reshuffle the county’s and court system’s staff.
MARTIN STREET OPTION:
“It’s an existing building, but it really needs a complete renovation to have anything in it. The only other option is to tear it down…You can’t have empty buildings sitting for long.”
– Assistant county manager Brian Baker
Baker nevertheless argued that, with its 14,000 square feet of floor space, the refurbished elderly services building would be an ideal place to centralize the county’s development-related functions like planning, inspections, and environmental health.
Baker added that the administrative annex on Elm Street doesn’t even have enough room to provide the county’s building inspectors with their own offices, while the elderly services building would continue going to seed if the county doesn’t find a new use for this structure – and soon.
“It’s an existing building, but it really needs a complete renovation to have anything in it,” Baker conceded. “The only other option is to tear it down…You can’t have empty buildings sitting for long.”
A majority of the commissioners ultimately selected this whirligig involving the administrative annex and the elderly services building over two other options that Baker had proffered to provide short-term relief for the court system’s space needs.
These alternatives included a proposal to let the court system take over the first floor of the county’s headquarters, which are currently home to the tax office, and purchase a new building in Graham to rehouse the dislocated county department. Baker said that this option would cost the county between $3 million and $4 million and would end up scattering the county’s core operations, although it would provide the tax office with a drive-thru, which it hasn’t had since it operated a satellite payment location out of a rented building at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
Baker’s third option would likewise force the tax office out of its current accommodations. In this case, however, it would be supplanted by inspections and planning, whose old home in the administrative annex would be given over to the court system. Baker also put a price tag of $3 million to $4 million on this proposal due, in part, to the need to purchase a new building to relocate the tax office.
During their ensuing discussion, the commissioners revealed their preference to quarter the tax office in a building at 832 South Main Street that formerly served as a branch of PNC Bank. The commissioners had previously gone behind closed doors to discuss the potential acquisition of this building as well as a recently vacated Bank of America branch along South Main Street and two buildings that Alamance Farmers Mutual owns near the juncture of Harden and Maple streets. Even so, it wasn’t until Tuesday that the focus on the former PNC bank became clear thanks to some unguarded remarks from commissioner Bill Lashley and John Paisley, Jr., the chairman of Alamance County’s commissioners.
The option which the commissioners ultimately selected on Tuesday seems to close the door on the potential purchase of a new building to rehouse the tax office. In fact, the absence of any additional real estate purchases was one thing that endeared the prevailing proposal to Paisley.
“I know it’s going to cost $4 to $4.5 million,” the board’s chairman conceded. “But we’re not going to have to buy a new building…and we’re picking up a lot of space.”
Meanwhile, Turner observed that this particular option will spare the county from having to scuttle the former elderly services building due to its deterioration.
“Frankly, it’s a decision that we should’ve made a long time ago,” he said, “and we’re using the buildings that we have and we’re creating one stop shop for permitting services in the county.”
Other members of the county’s governing board were less eager to play a veritable shell game with the J.B. Allen building, the administrative annex, and the former elderly services building.
Steve Carter, the vice chairman of Alamance County’s commissioners, complained that this convoluted reorganization will leave area residents confused about the locations of various court system functions.
“Right now, we’ve got a courtroom in the historic court[house]. We’ve got courtrooms [in a civil court building next door to the county’s headquarters], and we’ve got courtrooms in the J.B. Allen building,” Carter reminded his fellow commissioners. “We’re looking at adding a fourth building with court space, and our citizens have to come to town and figure out where to show up when they get called into court.”
Commissioner Pam Thompson also found this vertiginous series of moves a far cry from what she felt would be an ideal, long-term solution for the court system’s space needs.
“All of this rearranging is for one judge position, “she said. “I don’t want a Band-Aid. But we’re spending money here there and everywhere, and we’re not solving problems for the future.”
Meanwhile, commissioner Bill Lashley dusted off a suggestion that he had previously floated to address the court system’s shortage of space.
“If you want to free up space in the short-term, why not have night court,” he said. “That is a solution to this problem. But no one wants to take a good hard look at it.”
Lashley’s idea was more or less a non-starter with the court system officials who were on hand for Tuesday’s discussion. Yet, the proposed relocation of the jury lounge wasn’t any more popular with Alamance County’s sheriff Terry Johnson, who admitted as much during Tuesday’s discussion.
“We’ve got to look at the greater picture,” he told the commissioners. “We don’t have a scanner for that building.”
In the final analysis, the proposed relocation of jurors to the administrative annex seemed like the lesser evil to Turner and Paisley, who pressed the rest of the board to accept this recommendation.
“We don’t’ have the luxury of time,” Paisley went on to implore his more skeptical colleagues. “This may be putting a Band-Aid on [the court system’s space problem] to get us to the expansion of the J.B. Allen courthouse,” he added. “Yet, we [do] have Band-Aids. We don’t have miracles. And we’ve got to do something.”
Lashley and Carter eventually lent their reluctant support to this proposal, which went on to pass by a margin of 4-to-1. Thompson cast the lone vote of dissent.
