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Friday, December 07, 2007
Ind. Courts - "Cost of renovating the Vigo County Courthouse hits $13M"
On Aug. 3, 2006, an ILB entry began: "The Terre Haute Tribune-Star reports, in a story by Howard Greninger: 'The Vigo County Courthouse will close its doors to the public Friday as workers move the county clerk’s office to a new location as part of the building’s $10.5 million interior renovation.'"
Today Greninger reports, in a lengthy story that begins:
Originally estimated at $8 million to $8.5 million in 2002, the final cost for the interior renovation of the historic Vigo County Courthouse will be $13 million when work is completed in the first half of next year.The Vigo County Building Corp. meets today to give its approval for the closing on the sale of $3.1 million in bonds to finish the project. The bond sale closing is expected next week.
The additional money is needed to complete renovations after some initial funds were diverted to other costs, which county commissioners say were unforeseen. The county paid $553,592 to have a temporary Superior Court Division 2 courtroom built in the county’s Community Corrections facility at the corner of First and Ohio streets, which opened in 2006.
That move allowed five other courtrooms to be rotated in the courthouse while renovation is completed.
In addition, the county spent $523,996 from April 2004 to the end of 2006 for WK2 & Associates to scan and transfer county records into an electronic data base. That cost includes $9,145 the county paid the IRS after the federal agency in August 2006 filed liens against that company for failing to pay federal withholding taxes. The county then searched for another firm to perform that work.
The county also has been paying $5,208 per month in rent for office space at Sixth Street and Wabash Avenue, plus nearly $5,000 in utilities. The space is used to store court documents, which were to be scanned, and is temporarily housing the county’s voter registration and public defender offices.
The County Council has budgeted $60,000 for 2008, enough to pay for six months of that rental space.
County Auditor Jim Bramble said he thinks “there are all kinds of costs that nobody planned for initially in the project, that I think could reasonably have been foreseen. Moving the offices around was not calculated in the initial bond issue and the county had to pay for all the rent and extra help at Sixth and Wabash for storage of the records.”
Posted by Marcia Oddi on December 7, 2007 08:02 AM
Posted to Indiana Courts