Opening of new federal courthouse pushed back to August

Federal agencies waiting to move into the $50 million courthouse on Independence Street have been given a new date for the switch from current quarters -- sometime in July, with a grand opening set for August, a federal official said Friday.

Brad Scott, regional administrator for the General Service Administration office in Kansas City, said the latest delays were caused by problems with mistakes on acoustical cloth and carpeting for the courthouse. In January, officials had pegged April 1 as the opening date.

The most recent delay is just another in a series that have plagued the building since construction started. One of the earliest delays was caused by the need to sink more support piers than envisioned in original engineering specifications, Scott said.

"Most of these issues were unknowable," Scott said. "It has gone relatively smoothly. It is more complicated than building a house, what with the changing security requirements and the change in the superstructure that was put in place."

As the finishing touches are put on the courthouse -- Scott's calendar has May 4 marked as a day to declare the building "substantially complete" -- simple math could undermine Cape Girardeau County's plans to take over the current courthouse at 339 Broadway in Cape Girardeau.

The county commission asked Chauncy Buchheit, executive director of the Southeast Missorui Regional Planning and Economic Development Commission, to help navigate the federal bureaucracy. In a report to the commission, he said the county could likely fill only about 60 percent of the space in the courthouse with offices that would be approved by the Department of Justice under rules governing whether the county could get the building at no cost.

If the county must pay for the building, it complicates the transaction, Commissioner Jay Purcell said. All other issues, such as whether the federal agencies such as FBI and DEA that will not be housed will rent space from the county, are secondary, he said.

"There is no use to speculate until we know what types of dollars we are talking about," Purcell said. "There are a lot of variables, and it is impossible to speculate about the outcome. We are looking at ways of getting this accomplished."

The GSA will declare the courthouse as excess property within the next 90 days, said Laura McGinnis, a property manager with the agency. That will begin a process of evaluation and consideration of requests for public uses for the building, with a target of either turning it over for public use or selling it within a year, she said.

The Department of Justice is unlikely to sponsor a county takeover at no cost, Scott said. If a request for the building doesn't meet the public benefit rules, the courthouse will be sold.

"By law we have to ask for fair market value," Scott said. "There is some give and take."

The county houses the Cape Girardeau judicial offices and the county juvenile office in the Common Pleas Courthouse and the annex building. Those buildings are owned by the city.

rkeller@semissourian.com

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