Commissioners approve emergency design services for annex repair

Gonzales County commissioners will be using $212,125 in fund balance to pay for emergency design services to repair the Courthouse Annex on Sarah DeWitt Drive after a Monday, July 29 meeting.

Commissioners heard a presentation from Tere O’Connell of O’Connell Architecture LLC and Rob Berman of Wiss Janney Elstner (WJE) Engineering regarding their findings about whether any of the 25,200-square-foot building could be saved or whether it would have to be torn down completely to the foundation and rebuilt entirely.

“I believe that the bottom line is that the foundation and the structural steel can be reused in the building, so the next step is to figure out how to best to move forward and rehabilitate the building,” O’Connell told commissioners.

“The understanding is we’re going to be removing the exterior walls and then coming back in and designing a new structural framing system to go around the outside of the building keeping the existing roof, the existing foundation and the interior intact, and then working together to coordinate the new appearance of the outside and then the use of the space on the interior,” Berman added.

Berman told commissioners WJE did a “limited amount of non destructive testing” which included evaluating the concrete, steel, roof, framing and the foundation and noted the county’s maintenance crew had also dug a test pit beside one of the corners that helped them get a better look at the foundation at a lower depth.

“We didn't see any cracks,” Berman said. “There was some space underneath that perimeter like great beams on what look like drill piers or copper piles, but no issues underneath that corner of the foundation.”

Berman said all the perimeter walls will have to come out. To do so, shoring walls would be put in to hold up the existing roof and the roof would be disconnected from the existing walls, which would then come down and new steel framing would be put up around the perimeter to graft the existing roof with new columns.

While the existing roof, which was just replaced in 2018, can be saved for the most part, the degradation of the concrete makes it a must to take down the walls, Berman said.

“How long would they last? It’s tough to tell. It could be a couple of months or maybe a couple of years,” Berman said of the existing concrete walls. “I think they're all in various states of disrepair that doing nothing is not a prudent choice.

“There's falling debris on the interior and the exterior. The connection between the roof and those walls — that's an area where if there's some spalls or corrosion that occurs up at that location, you start losing connections between not just the roof joists, but the joist girders that are up there which could lead to a more catastrophic failure.

“Really the focus has been on reusing the steel and the foundation and we kind of went into it with the idea we’re not even going to try and save the walls,” Berman added. “The short story is the concrete walls are going to be removed and a lighter system will go up. It really will have less of an effect on the existing foundation, because it's going to be a significantly lighter system.”

Berman said he believes the county could reasonably expect to get “another 20 to 40 years” of life out of the building when it is completed.

“We're not targeting to design this as a temporary facility,” Berman said. “We'll be rehabbing it up to like essentially a new building.”

O’Connell said she recognized the pressure that the court has “on yourselves and on this building to sustain all of the people who have moved over here,” so she and WJE submitted a proposal for emergency design services that would have new plans and specs in place within a very fast eight week timeframe that would make them ready to go out for bids on the work.

“It is not a fantasy proposal, it's not doing a lot of analysis or anything, it's just straightforward,” O’Connell said. “Let's get a floor plan. Let's get it over to the engineers. Let's get with Wiss Janney to design the connection between the roof and the walls, because that's their forte. We've got the best skill sets for each team member to operate most efficiently for you and get a full set of plans and specs in eight weeks, which is crazy in some ways.”

O’Connell called the price for the emergency design, $212,125, “bare bones if you consider construction costs on a building of this size will be somewhere between $5 million and $7 million for construction.

“These fees are just two to four percent of that total project cost, which is not typical for architectural and engineering fees,” she said. “We're just trying to help you guys out.”

It is unknown how much rehabbing the building as suggested by WJE will cost as there has not been an estimate performed. However, O’Connell said local sources tell her commercial construction costs from brand new in Gonzales run at about $300 per square foot on the average.

“If that is the case, for this building, that would be $7.5 million (for new),” O’Connell said. “But, of course, we're starting with the slab and starting with steel, so it'll hopefully be less than that. If it's $200 a square foot for the renovation, that would be $5,040,000. It could be less expensive, but we have not done a cost analysis, so I really don't know.”

O’Connell said all electrical work will need to be replaced in the building as it dates back to the its original 1978 construction, which predates current building codes. She also said restrooms would have to be replaced, including all fixtures, in order to make them meet the Americans with Disabilities Act standards and be accessible to the public.