FEDS STILL FAVOR HAPPY HOLLOW SITE

Happy Hollow remains the preferred site for a new federal courthouse in Cape Girardeau unless Indians are buried there.

The government won't build a courthouse on Indian burial grounds, General Services Administration official Jim Ogden said Monday.

Ogden is with the GSA's regional office in Kansas City, which is in charge of selecting the site.

At this point, the site southeast of the Independence and Frederick intersection remains the front runner with the GSA.

"It still looks like it should present a satisfactory and economical site," Ogden said.

The GSA hopes to make a final decision by next spring.

A public hearing on the Happy Hollow site and two other sites probably will be held in November or December, Ogden said.

The other sites are the north side of the 400 block of Broadway and the old St. Francis Hospital block on Good Hope.

A fire last month heavily damaged a vacant building at the Happy Hollow site west of City Hall. But Ogden said it will have little impact on possible purchase of the site for a courthouse.

"We were aware that it burned," said Ogden.

He said the former Polar Therm insulation plant added little to the value of the land. The building had been vacant for some time.

The state fire marshal's office is still investigating the cause of the blaze.

The building won't be demolished until the investigation has been completed, said Tom Hinkebein, fire marshal for the Cape Girardeau Fire Department.

After that, the city could require owner Roger Friedrich to demolish the structure within three months or face having the city tear it down at the owner's expense.

Either way, it could be next year before the lot is cleaned up, Hinkebein said.

Meanwhile, the GSA continues to move ahead slowly with selecting a site for a new federal courthouse.

The GSA earlier this year said it might make a decision by fall. But that apparently won't happen because site assessment work hasn't started.

The GSA is in the process of signing a contract with a St. Louis area firm to do title research and other document searches related to the three possible sites.

The work could begin this month, Ogden said. The record-search phase could take three to four months.

If no problems turn up in the document search, soil tests will be run to make sure there isn't any contamination problem. The nearly six-acre site includes land that once served as a trash dump.