Commissioners review annex renovation plans during workshop session

Representatives from O’Connell Architecture LLC discussed their nearly complete plans for renovating the Gonzales County Annex building during a workshop with Gonzales County commissioners on Monday, Oct. 28.

Consulting architect Jack Hawkins, who had met with all county departments earlier this year. said the plans, which are about “95 percent complete,” would normally take “about six months of work, and we did it in 75 days.” As a result, there are things that need to be tweaked on the plans.

“There are areas where we really do have to circle back,” Hawkins said. “The mechanical engineers only got us some mechanical drawings in the last week. The structural engineers never saw them and reused all the existing rooftop air conditioning units, but some of them have to move just for efficient cooling and heating.

“There are additional units that have to go in to bring the courtroom areas up to modern codes for air changes an hour, and for it to keep them cool efficiently. Those we need to go back to the structural engineers and get the roof structure and make sure that everything can carry the loads. There’s a two-ton unit that's going on for the district courtroom. Not two tons of cooling, but two tons of weight, that has basically got to go up on that roof.”

Principal architect Tere O’Connell said when the county asked her group to look at the building the court “chose to just proceed with the structural evaluation only, so there wasn’t any code analysis or any mechanical, electrical, plumbing analysis at the outset — it was just the structural work.”

“When the code analysis was done and the MEP design was done, the structural engineer now needs slight amount of additional services to complete,” O’Connell explained.

O’Connell said Hawkins’ plans for the 25,200-square-foot building “takes down the exterior failing tilt wall construction and replaces it with a new, steel-frame assembly, reusing the slab, reusing the structural steel columns inside the building and reusing the roof.”

She said she had not done a cost estimate, but understands that the average cost per square foot for construction in Gonzales is about $300 per square foot for new construction, which means building a new building would cost the county more than $7.5 million.

“The RFP is about 3 percent of that, which is kind of unheard of in the industry,” O’Connell said. ‘It’s just a bit of very efficient production of plans and specs with our structural engineering, mechanical engineering, plumbing, electrical and accommodations for commissioners court, district court, district clerk's office, JP’s office, constable, county attorney, conference room for clients, a holding area, probation is in this full quadrant, and then back here is record storage.”

Hawkins said they will need help in developing accurate elevations for the back portion of the building “because we need a second means of egress out the back — a second exit.”

“You've got a building that potentially will have 300 or 400 people in it, so you need two exit doors,” Hawkins said “There's got to be a remote fire exit. Ideally, the code likes them as far apart as possible, so we're coming out the back and you've got a significant grade change. I don't even know how many steps we need to get down. We've got to go back to the structural engineers to engineer the steel staircase back there. It’s not going to be a ramp, because a ramp would have to be huge.”

Hawkins said he is trying to make the steps “as small and as simple and as budget friendly as possible, because we understand this is not the building which you really want to spend your money on.”

“We have ADA access on the front, so the second exist doesn’t need to meet the letter,” Hawkins added. “We need one accessible means of egress, and that's our main front door.”

Hawkins said he assumes the judges and commissioners would be using the back door at the annex more often than the front door “because there’s a parking lot back there.”

“It's nice and convenient, and that back door should just be locked all the time with panic hardware and a fire exit,” Hawkins said. “No one should be using that back door except for county employees. That's strictly an emergency exit and for the convenience of you all.”

Precinct 2 Commissioner Donnie Brzozowski asked if the offices and the people who move from the Courthouse to the annex during renovations to the Courthouse will be staying there permanently.

“The office will be there,” County Judge Pat Davis replied. “Some of them will probably move back, which will open up some to move, like the county extension agent, if they wanted to go back over there. I don't know what DPS would do, but probation would be there indefinitely.

“I would have to come back here. The courtrooms would come back here. (District Clerk) Janice (Sutton) would probably were going to come back here, but it just depends.”

Brzozowski then asked what the intent and use would be for the courtroom space at the annex after the Courthouse is renovated, to which Davis replied he did not know.

“I don’t like to spend money, but are we at the point we’d be better off knocking it down and building a new one if we’re going to spend that kind of money?” Brzozowski asked. “If we’re going to spend 2-3 million on it, fine, but if we’re going to spend $7 million to $8 million on it, we probably need to look at new structure, whether we build it there or someplace else.”

“I don't know what the cost estimate would be to refab this one,” Davis said. “I would hope that if it would cost 7 million to build that, if you came back in to redo it, it would be a lot less than the 7 million.”

“Well the slab will stand,” Hawkins said. “The structural steels all stand. The roof fits will all stand. We're reusing every air conditioning unit with the exception of adding two.”

“In your professional opinion, would you think it would be less than building a new building?” Davis asked.

“Sure, though I’m not sure what the order of magnitude would be,” O’Connell said.

“It's tough to do plans for 25,000 square feet. There's a lot of square footage in this,” Hawkins said. “I want to tell you that I've spent the last 75 days trying to chisel every penny I can out of this. I know this is not the building you want to spend your money on, but, you know, it's still 25,000 square feet and it needs to be functional.”

Precinct 4 Commissioner Collie Boatright expressed concern that, like Brzozowski, he didn’t want to see the county spend a lot of money on the building if “when we move out we’re going to have a big empty building and nothing to do with it.”

“We’ll still have entities in there,” Davis said. “It's a wide open deal from what you could want to put in there. You may even want to take a portion of that district courtroom to have more of your record storage. Maybe elections would want to move over there to give them more room where they have all of their equipment on the ground floor level. I don't think we would have any problem filling it with somebody.

“the district court might want to just keep the courtroom in their back pocket, because of the jail being right there, so convenient.”

Precinct 3 Commissioner Kevin La Fleur questioned whether the county couldn’t save money on a courtroom by just holding commissioners court at the Randle-Rather building to save money, but Davis replied the county still has to have two courtrooms.

“You would still have to have that, because you would have to have a six-person jury panel box for county court and JP court, and then you'd also have to have a 12-person jury box for the district court,” Davis said.

Davis also noted that sometimes both the 25^th and 2^nd 25^th District Courts are in session at the same time, or the justice court might need space at the same time as the county court and the district court. In that case, there will also be a conference room for the JPs which can be used at times as a makeshift justice court or a place where Davis can hold probate hearings if the other courtrooms at the annex are occupied.