Higher ground for the courts?
Debate rages over retrofit or rebuilding criminal courthouse
After twice closing the 20-story downtown criminal courthouse due to flood damage since it was completed in 2000, Harris County leaders are planning to repair the shuttered building so the next time it floods it can be reopened within days — not months — of the water receding.
The retrofitting is a bitter disappointment to some of the building’s most frequent users, mostly defense lawyers and prosecutors, who hoped the yearlong closing — the second in the building’s 17 years of operation — would persuade county leaders to build a new courthouse on higher ground nearby.
The tower- ing building, a block from Buffalo Bayou and home to county offices and more than 40 courtrooms, is completely unusable after Hurricane Harvey. It will remain closed for at least the next six to seven months, with some courts and offices not being able to return to operation until as late as July 2019, officials confirmed.
The delay means criminal court judges will likely spend a year presiding over dockets in the concrete basement of the county jail and almost all Harris County judges, civil and criminal, will stay doubled up in packed courtrooms in three other courthouses. Grand jurors meet in the historic 1910 courthouse, two blocks away.
Four months after Hurricane Harvey flooded the lower floors, Harris County Judge Ed Emmett said he does not know yet what is in store for the iconic downtown criminal courts facility. Emmett said he is waiting for a recommendation from the county engineer, and the county engineer noted that consultants hired by the county are just beginning their analysis.
“It’s time to scrap it and start over.” Chris Tritico, attorney
The decision to spend what could be another $20 million to fix a $100 million building has critics asking whether the county is throwing good money after bad at the long-troubled skyscraper at 1201 Franklin.
“It’s time to scrap it and start over,” attorney Chris Tritico said in a widely circulated proposal in October. “There were errors in planning, design and execution. Our Commissioners Court should stop spending money on a building that will never work for the purpose it was intended and spend our money on a permanent fix.”
Tritico, a former president of the Harris County Criminal Lawyers Association, has become the unofficial spokesman for people who want a new building, not renovations.
“I’ve had judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys and members of the public who have told me they are in favor of this,” he said. “I don’t think the criminal courthouse, as it’s constructed, is ever going to big enough for the number of people who use it every day. It’s never going to be big enough.”
But Tritico and his supporters say the recent water damage that closed the courthouse is only the latest setback for a structure that has not lived up to all expectations.
Crowds, inconvenience
For years, massive crowds have swarmed the building every weekday for 9 a.m. docket calls on the courts in upper floors, while the afternoons saw almost no traffic. The backup of defendants and lawyers trying to squeeze into packed elevators — some of which are frequently out of service — meant long lines of people waiting outside. The entrances to the staircases in the first floor lobby — and on each floor — are usually hidden by forbidding doors that many judges, against fire code, hang signs to prohibit the general public from going through.
A dearth of benches in the hallway outside the courtrooms means that on any given weekday, families of crime victims or suspects are forced to sit on the floor as they wait on court proceedings.
Some of the crush of people has been eased in recent years by staggered docket times and days, but the judges have not adopted a universal plan to coordinate those intervals.
“We’re not talking about flooding, we’re talking about the people every day who are inconvenienced every day,” Tritico said.
He said county officials in a recent meeting told him they are unlikely to support construction of a new courthouse, but he is still pushing the issue.
“I intend to keep working toward what I think is the best interest of the people who use that building,” he said.
If he can’t persuade officials to build something new, he said, Tritico said he will help to make the renovations as effective as possible. After publicly championing a new courthouse, he was invited to join at least two county committees to look at the issue.
No official decisions, he noted, have yet been made about what will happen next.
In fact, four months after Harvey, the county has not entered into any remodeling contracts and has not set a deadline or timetable for the remedial work that may be expected, officials acknowledged.
County officials say they want to fix up the courthouse then dive deep into what criminal justice, and county population, might look like in 20 to 50 years.
“With the population growing so fast, if we build a building today, are they going to see the same inefficiencies in 20 years?” asked County Budget Officer Bill Jackson. “When you build these buildings, you don’t build for what you need today, you build for what you’re going to need in 20 years.”
He noted that the internet has fundamentally changed the way we do business in the past 20 years, and the Internet will undoubtedly change criminal justice in ways that should be studied before proposing any major construction. He cited Amazon as an example of an innovation that fundamentally changed the way Americans shop.
Jackson estimated that a new courthouse would cost at least $140 million to $210 million. In 2016, Los Angeles built a 25-courtroom facility for $340 million. A 22-story courthouse in San Diego opened earlier this year with 70 courts and a jury assembly room at a cost of $555 million.
“Half a billion dollar courthouse and I bet they look at it in 20 years and say, ‘What were we thinking?’, simply because of all the electronics and the way the younger people will do business,” he said.
Millions to build, repair
On Nov. 14, county commissioners hired 10 architectural and engineering firms to consult on different county projects, mostly property damaged by Hurricane Harvey, as part of a master plan that includes reopening the criminal courthouse with improvements. No estimate of cost has been released, and it is likely still being tabulated by the consultant, Pierce Goodwin Alexander & Linville Inc.
The county spent almost $100 million on constructing the criminal courthouse building, which opened in 2000 and flooded in Tropical Storm Allison 17 months later. Those repairs, along with flood prevention measures and a new elevator, cost $19.6 million and took a year.
After meeting with officials and hearing about the damage, Tritico said he expects the new round of repairs will easily cost as much as the 2001 fixes.
The new fixes would likely include moving HVAC equipment from the basement that was damaged when standing floodwaters seeped through walls. There could also be a push to make the building “floodable” with walls that won’t mold after being flooded.
“All the damaged stuff has been pulled out,” said Harris County Engineer John Blount. “Now (the consultants) are going through and looking at it, because the issue is: How are we going to mitigate it so that if a similar flood happened again, we could open the courthouse two days later instead of moving out?”
County officials have forecast the building will not be fully operational until at least July 2019, but some courts and divisions may be moving back in sooner. There was extensive damage to courtrooms on the upper floors due to flooding in the basement that shorted out electronic sensors, triggering the pumps that supply the automatic sprinkler system. False readings caused huge amounts of water to be pumped to upper floors, causing fixtures to burst and sprinklers to activate all over the building, county officials confirmed.
“Based on the previous (flooding) process, we would anticipate moving some courts back in, in a phased-in approach, in six to seven months,” Blount said. “But the whole thing is going to be over a year.”
He emphasized that there is still no consensus on what to do or how long that work will take.
“It could take a year to 18 months,” Blount said. “Everyone asks ‘How long is it going to take exactly?’ and I say, ‘Can you tell me exactly what’s wrong and exactly how long it will take to fix it?’ ”
While the county seems to be moving forward on a plan to reopen the criminal courthouse where it stands, there has been a groundswell among the people who use the building that it may be time to build a new courthouse on higher ground across the street. Thoughtful construction, Tritico has argued, could fix the building’s longtime ills like overcrowded elevators, inaccessible staircases and no shelter for long lines of people who have to stand outside in the rain or the heat.
After publishing his plan as a letter to the editor in the Houston Chronicle and speaking to commissioners’ court, Tritico was asked to join at least two county committees that were looking at the issue.
Longtime prosecutors and defense attorneys, who spoke on condition of anonymity, envision a mid-rise building with a footprint that takes up the entire city block at 1100 Congress where the old family law center and the permanently closed district attorney’s building now stand. They long for a building with eight or 10 courtrooms on five or six floors so the courtrooms they dart between every morning can be connected by escalators, elevators and stairs. In that plan, the damaged criminal courthouse would be renovated into a county office building.
Other ambitious plans include razing the criminal courthouse and the adjoining old jail at 1301 Franklin to capitalize on a double lot. However, that proposed building would sit less than a block from Buffalo Bayou, the downtown waterway that habitually floods. It would also mean the criminal courts would be displaced for years during demolition and construction.
The old 1980s master plan
The courthouse is where it is because of a master plan that includes a tunnel and bridge over the bayou from the Harris County Jail, a complex of buildings that can house 10,000 inmates.
The plan, developed beginning in the 1980s, envisioned a courthouse square that would be compact, cheaper to run and easy to navigate. At the center would sit an open-air plaza with a jury assembly center below ground, so prospective jurors could enter from above and be escorted to different courthouses though air-conditioned tunnels.
That vision came true with the completion of the $13 million jury assembly building. Architects apparently planned for floods, but the properties were still knocked out for a year by the historic rain in Allison and now from Harvey. The jury assembly building, which is only six years old, is expected to be a complete loss.
Tritico was also appointed to a committee of the county’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, which will meet quarterly to try to work through systemic problems. The group includes about 20 criminal justice department heads and officeholders like the sheriff, the district attorney and two commissioners.
That committee is expected to weigh in on a different study by the budget office, engineering and technology departments to “recommend the best use and placement of court facilities throughout Harris County in light of Hurricane Harvey.”
County officials, including County Judge Ed Emmett and Precinct 3 Commissioner Steve Radack, said they are waiting to see the consultants’ reports before deciding what should happen next.
Rodney Ellis, Precinct 1 commissioner, is also on that committee. By email, he said the county should consider all the options in getting the courthouse up and running.
“All options should be on the table to make sure that we run the most equitable and efficient system of justice possible, which requires us to balance access to the courts, logistics, public safety and cost,” he said.
He also said he looks forward to the analysis of what the future may hold for criminal justice.
“We have to make sure that all county residents, regardless of where they live, have access to our court system,” he said. “I’m awaiting the result of the study before making any decisions.”