The Haywood County board is proceeding with a $36 million courthouse and jail project despite continued objections from two of its five members.

The contentious project took a critical step forward Friday when commissioners OK’d — by a 3-2 vote — the basic design for what will be the largest building project in the county’s history. The vote gave architects the green light to move beyond basic floor plans to detailed architectural drawings.

The plan given the go-ahead Friday will also require the purchase of the Clyde Savings and Loan property on Main Street in Waynesville.

The plan would put a four-story justice center on Main Street between the current Clyde Savings building and the historic courthouse. A lower level portico would be at the same height as the historic courthouse and use the same material, tying the two together. Above the current height of the historic courthouse, a less expensive material would be used. The plan also includes a five-story parking on Branner Avenue with the top level open. The top of the deck would be only a few feet above the elevation of the sidewalks on Main Street.

“I’ll make a motion that we proceed with this schematic,” said Commissioner Bill Noland.
Noland, Chairman Jim Stevens and Commissioner Carlyle Ferguson voted for the motion after representatives of HLM Architects gave a presentation. Commissioners Wade Francis and Mary Ann Enloe voted against it.

Moments before Noland’s vote, Enloe had asked commissioners to slow the project and take time to involve taxpayers.

“I make a motion that we stop now with the design architects are working on, take two months to discuss this with the public, and then after those meetings settle on a plan,” Enloe said.

She suggested waiting until March to hold the referendum on how to pay for the courthouse. That proposal was voted down 3-2.

The referendum will allow voters to decide whether to pay for the justice center, courthouse renovation, parking deck and a new jail with general obligation or certificate of participation bonds. If voters say no to the general obligation bonds, commissioners can seek Local Government Commission permission to proceed with the project using certificate of participation bonds. However, bond opponents told The Enterprise Mountaineer they will urge the LGC to deny the county’s request use those bonds to build the courthouse.

Earlier in Friday’s meeting, Enloe read a prepared statement (see accompanying article) describing why she thought the courthouse and jail project should be slowed.

“The citizens’ effort to stop this project will in all probability succeed, unless we as elected representatives behave as statesmen and not as politicians, and arrive at a compromise that includes the beliefs of a strong cross-section of the people who are going to pay for this  the taxpayers of Haywood County,” Enloe’s statement read.

Commissioners had already decided to hold a referendum on the financing method for the courthouse, and Francis told board members Friday that the elections supervisor said it would be impossible to do that by November. Francis suggested holding it with the May 2002 primaries. No date ws set for the referendum.

Stevens, however, accused Enloe and Francis of trying to put off the vote and delay the project.
“We’ve diddled and daddled all along the way, and we need to go ahead with this,” Stevens said. “We’ve got to build a justice center and jail, and I am not going to throw away what we have. I’m not ready to start over.”

Noland agreed: “We’ve been at it two years, every meeting has been public ... It is not time to start over and throw out two years of work.”

Even as he cast his vote for the current plan, Stevens was still not completely satisfied with the proposal. He told architects he would like it better if one story was removed from the justice center, suggesting that a three-story building would fit in better with Waynesville’s existing Main Street. He suggested putting a ground-level building between the parking deck and the new justice center.

Architect Doug Kleppin, however, said that was looked at but not included in the schematic for two reasons: cost and expansion.

To build another building would require a separate foundation and separate roof. Both of those factors drive up costs, the architect said. Also, the second floor is designated as courtroom expansion space when the offices that would originally use that space are moved elsewhere. Shaving a floor off the plan and utilizing the space between the justice center and the parking deck would eliminate that space as an option for future expansion. In short, architects told Stevens his idea would cost more on the front end and in the future. Still, Kleppin agreed that a one-story smaller building was a “benefit” in terms of aesthetics.

Stevens also asked architects to delay work and design on the Superior Courtroom in the historic courthouse. He had questions about the plan to go in and make the old courtroom more narrow, and suggested architects hold off on finalizing that design. Two benefits of making design changes to the Superior Courtroom were to allow construction of just one elevator in the old courthouse and to leave unaltered the exterior of the building, according to Kleppin. If a hallway is not put in the existing Superior Courtroom, it will likely necessitate a second elevator. That would almost certainly be added outside the building, meaning the exterior of the existing courthouse would be altered, Kleppin said.

 

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