Plans firming up for new judicial building

Plans for a new judicial building for the Eastern District of Carroll County are moving forward.

On Friday, May 26, the Carroll County Quorum Court’s Eastern District Judicial Building Steering Committee met with an architect and general contractor to discuss preliminary plans for a judicial building to be located near the Carroll County Law Enforcement Complex on Hailey Road in Berryville. While plans for the new building are fluid, it could house the Eastern District circuit courtroom as well as office space for the Carroll County circuit judge and space to conduct early voting and store election equipment.

At this point, District 11 Justice of the Peace John Howerton said, the building would cover about 8,000 square feet. In addition, the committee discussed a 4,000-squarefoot expansion of the law enforcement complex, which houses the Carroll County Sheriff’s Office and the Carroll County Detention Center.

Howerton, who chairs the committee, emphasized that county officials will not seek a tax increase to fund either building project.

“I will not support this if we’re going to try to add a tax,” Howerton said.

Howerton said the county has been appropriating money to a courthouse fund for the past several years. He said the amount of that annual appropriation, in addition to increased tax revenue after a county-wide reassessment of real estate values, should be enough to cover payments on a bond issue. Voters would have to approve the bond issue.

“The last seven or eight years, just during the course of business, at the end of the year, we’ve been able to put back $100,000 or sometimes $150,000 every year into what we’ve called the courthouse fund,” Howerton said. “That fund has now got $1.1 million in it. So my thought is, running like we have been, we can see that we’re going to have $150,000 extra money that we haven’t used elsewhere in the county. Can you guarantee that? No, but that’s been the track record in the past five or six (years). So that’s what I’m looking at, along with just a little bit increase in tax base because of the reassessment that put your personal property, my personal property up 50 percent. So there’s going to be a little more. (We) may be able to finance a project of $2.3 to $2.5 (million) with a payment of $190,000 a year or so.”

The county currently pays $1,500 a month in rent for the circuit judge’s office space and $800 a month to rent secure storage space for election equipment.

One issue that will have to be resolved is whether the county can purchase the land where the judicial building would be located. That land was purchased with revenue from a halfcent sales tax that is dedicated to the detention center. The county is awaiting an opinion on that issue from the state Attorney General’s Office.

Expansion of the law enforcement complex would be funded through the dedicated sales tax, and Howerton said that project could start before the judicial building.

Bidding the projects separately could be significantly more expensive, however, architect Jim Langford of Collierville, Tenn.-based Spirit Architecture Group told the committee.

“If we bid these separately, the numbers are going to be higher than if we bid them together,” Langford said. “It just is. If these are being built in tandem, he’s got one guy up here, one time, doing both projects.”

Howerton asked for a “ballpark” estimate of the cost difference if the projects are bid separately.

“That’s the hard part anymore,” said Robert Barrett, president of Smith-Doyle Contractors, based in Cordova, Tenn. “If you’d asked me two years ago, we could pretty much predict what the inflationary factors would be to bid something a year from now. It’s a lot harder now. … Probably 20 percent higher to do them separately.”

Howerton said he, Langford and Barrett met with Circuit Judge Scott Jackson earlier on Friday to discuss needed space for the judge’s office. They also met with election officials.

District 6 JP Craig Hicks, a member of the committee, emphasized that Jackson has not urged the committee to include space for his office in the judicial building.

“The circuit judge is not pushing for this,” Hicks said. “He doesn’t care either way. He’ll do whatever we ask.”

Hicks asked Barrett about the cost per square foot to complete the project.

“When we met with all the different architects four or five months ago, they were saying $300, $350 a square foot,” Hicks said. “Now the number’s been thrown out there recently, $400 a square foot.”

“There again, that COVID crystal ball’s a little fuzzy nowadays,” Barrett said. “It’s unfathomable to me that we’d be talking about this kind of building and even saying $350. But every time I bid something, it tells me that those are real numbers. That’s what we’re experiencing. So, at this stage, figuring how much to have in your back pocket, I’d figure $400. Once you really start nailing things down, and what the environment is at that time, you may be a little bit closer to $350.”