Plans to turn jail cell blocks into courtrooms are a step closer to reality in Greene County, where architects will start work on the key design for a courthouse campus remodeling project.
The Greene County Commission voted to enter into a pair of contract agreements for design work at three buildings on the North Boonville Avenue courthouse campus. The Greene County Commission unveiled preliminary ideas to move offices and repurpose building space in late July.
N-Form Architecture is doing the design infill or redesign of the former Greene County Jail on Boonville Avenue, and across the street, Paragon Architecture is doing redesign work for the Greene County Information Systems Department to move to the Public Safety Center at the corner of North Boonville and West Scott Street. Both of the agreements reached Dec. 21 are standard American Institute of Architects-approved design contracts for services.
The potential payout in the N-Form contract is based on a percentage of to-be-determined overall cost of the project. The amount of money to be paid to Paragon is a fixed fee of $39,300.
Greene County Administrator Chris Coulter explained N-Form’s fee of 6.5 percent. In late July 2022, the estimated cost to remodel the jail and reorganize county government offices was about $19 million, but Coulter said it’s impossible to know an exact cost at this time.
“We don’t know what the building cost is going to be,” Coulter said.
Because Paragon’s project is relatively smaller, Coulter said it made sense for the county commission to lock in a rate.
“With smaller projects, architects will do a fixed fee rather than a percentage,” Coulter said.
What used to be blocks of jail cells would be turned into courtroom space, with the specifications to be determined by Greene County’s circuit judges and their staff members.
Consolidating spaces and leaving the tower
When the Information Systems Department moves, the Greene County Commission will move its office from the 10th floor of the Cox Medical Tower to the second floor of the Greene County Historic Courthouse. The move would stop about $107,000 in rental expenses per year. Greene County government agencies rent four floors in the tower.
Greene County has rented space in the tower for at least seven years, starting with the Greene County prosecuting attorney’s office, and then the Greene County Commission for about five years. It would continue to rent two floors for the prosecutor’s offices under the terms of the new proposal.
The Greene County Public Administrator will move from the tower at Cox Medical Center North to offices in the Judicial Courts Facility on the north end of the courthouse campus.
New jail was the first domino
Before the new $150 million Greene County Sheriff’s Office and jail campus opened on West Division Street, the Greene County sheriff had working office spaces in five different locations.
The commissioners unveiled five key objectives across the campus: pave the west parking lot of the courthouse campus; meet the needs of Greene County’s officeholders; use building space efficiently; consolidate offices onto one campus; and meet a budget where all of the money will come from a general revenue building bond that has been planned for several years.
“The County is expected to issue a final bond at the end of the first quarter in 2023,” the county’s 2022 budget document reads. “This bond will consist of the estimated $25.3 million to finish the Sheriff’s Office and Jail facility and possibly another $19.9 million in campus planning projects. The repayment source of this bond was planned for in the 2017 tax resolution and by the elimination of rental payments.”
Under the proposed reorganization, juvenile courts, juvenile courtrooms and the Greene County Youth Academy will all be under the same roof on the first floor of the former jail. The existing Greene County Juvenile Justice Center will be demolished and the property will be turned into a parking lot.
Voters in Greene County enacted a law enforcement sales tax in 2017 that funds construction of the new jail and sheriff’s office. Three buildings add up to 365,000 square feet of space on 85 acres of land, which leaves room for expansion at the West Division Street site in the future.
