County accepts Courthouse planning grant, discusses annex renovation plans
Gonzales County will accept a $1,095,429 planning grant from the Texas Historic Courthouse Preservation Program after voting 4-1 to do so on Monday, Aug. 26.
Commissioners also discussed work that would need to be done to refurbish and restore the Gonzales County Annex building and reviewed design plans from O’Connell Architecture LLC showing what departments would have space in the revived building.
The county will be required to come up with a 30 percent match of a little more than $469,000 for the THC grant, which can be used to develop construction documents for the full restoration of a historic courthouse. Gonzales County had 90 days from July 29 to accept or decline the grant. The matching funds are being budgeted over the course of the next two fiscal years.
During a workshop on county buildings and repairs, the court discussed the plans, which show the main entrance on the southwest side would lead into a secure, screening area with a metal detector before coming into the lobby. Offices accessible from the lobby include JP 1, County Judge, District Clerk, Veterans Service, the District Courtroom, County Courtroom/Commissioners Court, Game Warden, County Attorney and Constable Pct 1.
On the southeast side of the building, there is a secure entrance for the Adult and Juvenile Probation offices so these individuals do not have to go through the main lobby to get to their destination. The northeast corner of the building is where records storage and IT servers are located.
“They went around and visited with everybody in order to make that a functional place, somewhat temporarily, but it's allowed every office that's in there to have the opportunity to visit (with the architects),” County Judge Pat Davis said, noting that the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension office will remain at the Master Gardener’s building on Fair Street for the foreseeable future.
Once the building is complete, it would allow the Courthouse to be vacated for renovation, hopefully with a full restoration grant from the THCPP in the next biennium as Gonzales County had the highest-ranked project during this funding cycle that did not get full funding, Davis said.
When the Courthouse renovation is completed, nearly all of the occupants that would be in the west side of the annex would relocate back to the Courthouse, allowing that space to be reallocated.
Precinct 2 Commissioner Donnie Brzozowski asked if the commissioners court could be moved instead to the third floor of the Randle Rather building, which would allow the county to spend less money turning space at the annex into a courtroom.
“It would still be two courtrooms, because you're going to need two courtrooms, due to the fact that you have justice court, you have district court,” Davis said. “Sometimes — it doesn't happen all the time — but sometimes you have both district judges here (at the Courthouse), where you have one upstairs and one down here, so you really do need the two courtrooms. And I know that sometimes when they have the visiting judges that come, they have to have a place to go.”
Brzozowski asked Davis if he had any idea how much the annex construction would cost in its entirety or just to replace the annex’s faltering existing walls, to which Davis said they will not until the engineers can take the plans to work up an estimate. Davis added that all of the load-bearing walls have to be shored up on the exterior first and then renovation on the inside could take place in stages if desired.
“I think we can go ahead and go with it, but we need to break it down,” Precinct 1 Commissioner K.O. “Dell” Whiddon said. “We need to get the outside wall fixed first and see what that's going to cost and then we'll know if we go any further or not because we don't know how much money it's going to cost.”
Commissioners voted to move forward with the existing plan so the engineers could provide cost estimates in a breakdown for both exterior work and interior work.
Davis said issues at the Randle Rather building involving pieces of the structure coming off the exterior would require an engineer to review and recommend solutions with the county having received a quote of $15,000 for that process. Commissioners voted unanimously to move forward with bringing in an engineer for the Randle Rather assessment.
Moving into discussion on the Courthouse grant, Brzozowski said he was concerned about spending money on a Courthouse planning grant match when the county doesn’t know how much it will need to fix the annex.
“What concerns me is we got this other building,” Brzozowski said. “I know the courthouse needs to be worked on but I would like to see us fix what we’ve got that's messed up. This courthouse is workable right now.”
“It's not workable,” Davis replied. “When it rains, we are full of water in the basement and it just gets worse. I just cannot see us not going out for this grant to get this. We would never be able to restore this Courthouse on our county budget without this grant. I would hate to see us lose a grant that we're already this far in and got approved for the planning.
“We may have to consider, depending on how much it costs, we might have to go out for a bond. I don't know, but we're going to have to do something in order to have a place to house folks that that work for us. A bond is nothing that that would hurt because the county has no debt at this time. A lot of times when you do have debt, it gives you a little bit more spending money for things you need. I don't think it would affect us that bad in the tax rate at this time.”
“This grant sounds like a good deal, but it comes at a bad time when we've got so much stuff,” Brzozowski said. “We’ve got the annex, we’ve got Randle Rather and we have this. The county is in good shape right now, but I'd hate to see us get in a jam. I just want to be clear, I'm not against fixing the courthouse, but not at this time, even with a grant, because we have to spend all that money and it doesn't even do anything to the building.”
Commissioners then voted on a motion to accept the grant, with Brzozowski being the only vote against the motion.
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