It may have pleased the courts – and it certainly gladdened the local court system’s top brass – when Alamance County’s commissioners signed off on a long-ruminated expansion of the county’s main criminal courts building on Monday.
During a regularly-scheduled meeting that evening, the county’s board of commissioners agreed to press ahead with a plan to renovate and expand the Judge J.B. Allen, Jr. Court House – at an anticipated cost of $37 million to the county’s taxpayers.
This project, which the commissioners ultimately approved by a margin of 4-to-1, is a much watered down version of a much more ambitious venture that was first broached to the commissioners two years ago.
The commissioners initially balked at this plan due to its estimated price tag of $99 million. They were also reluctant to authorize a “right-sized” alternative that would’ve still set the county back between $60 and $70 million.
Under the current $37 million proposal, the county would spend $10 million to renovate the current premises of the criminal courthouse. In the meantime, it would break ground on a three-story structure with four extra courtrooms and 9,000 square feet of office space in an area to the west of the existing building that’s presently home to a parking lot.
Once this facility is finished, the county may be able to reclaim some, or all, of the civil courts building that currently abuts its headquarters – although some of the commissioners expressed concern about the court system’s potential loss of the three courtrooms within the civil courts building.
In the end, a majority of commissioners was willing to proceed with this project in order to put a period on a conversation about the local court system’s space needs that had dragged on for more than two years.
“This is a reasonable response to a request that is needed,” commissioner Craig Turner declared as he summed up the prevailing mood of the board. “It’s something that we’ve been putting off for two years. I don’t like to spend additional revenue, but I don’t see a way out.”
In order to cover the expected costs of this project, the commissioners had already set aside $10 million in funds from the county’s capital reserves. During their discussion on Monday, they agreed to tack on another $5 million from these reserves, leaving another $22 million to be funded through a 20-year bank loan.
The county’s finance department estimates that the county will need to implement a property tax increase of .89 cents in two years time in order to pay off this loan. This prospective tax hike is about a fifth of a cent less than the finance department had originally projected under the assumption that the county would only contribute $10 million from its capital reserves toward this project. Despite some measured objections from staff, Turner pushed for the addition of another $5 million from the capital reserves so as to reduce the proposed bank loan’s overall impact on the property tax rate.
A majority of the commissioners agreed to greenlight this $37 million endeavor on Monday in lieu of a rival, two-story option that bore an estimated cost of $28 million. The commissioners had previously contemplated both of these options at a meeting earlier this month that ended without any final decisions on the court system’s long-term needs for more space.
The commissioners had also flirted with other proposals during this earlier meeting which would’ve forced them to yield some of the county’s own offices in Graham to the court system and rehouse its operations at county-owned buildings in Burlington or in privately-owned structures that it would need to purchase.
The commissioners didn’t consider any of these displacement-based options on Monday. Nor, in the end, were they willing to accept a two-story expansion – despite the $9 million reduction in the cost of the project and a decrease in the bank loan’s projected tax impact to roughly half a cent on the tax rate.
John Paisley, Jr., the chairman of Alamance County’s commissioners, was particularly critical of the two-story option in spite of the associated cost savings to taxpayers.
“I do try to save the taxpayer’s money,” Paisley declared before he made a motion in favor of the three-story option. “But at the same time, when it’s necessary, you have to spend money…and the more we delay this decision, the more it’s going to cost us.”
Paisley’s motion was eventually seconded by Turner before it passed in a 4-to-1 vote with the added support of commissioners Bill Lashley and Steve Carter, the vice chairman of Alamance County’s commissioners. Commissioner Pam Thompson cast the only dissenting vote for reasons she didn’t elaborate at the time.
In the end, this move on the part of the county’s governing board drew a favorable verdict from Tom Lambeth, the county’s outgoing senior resident superior court judge.
“We want to thank y’all because this is much needed, and you’ve had the foresight to do this,” Lambeth declared before he added a few words about his forthcoming departure from the superior court bench. “I retire in six weeks – October 1; so this will be an addition I won’t get to enjoy, except as a tax paying citizen.”
