The future of the historic Brown County Courthouse is still in flux as local officials work to determine if a new justice center is needed or not and how to pay for it.
The Brown County Commissioners and Brown County Council met jointly March 4 to discuss this topic and possible funding.
Engineering firm DLZ began examining the future of the courthouse last January. The firm offered two suggestions last summer: Move court offices to a new building that would be built next to the Brown County Law Enforcement Center, and move some county employees into the current courthouse after it is renovated.
DLZ recommended building a 26,910-square-foot justice center at an estimated cost of between $6,750,000 and $7,250,000, plus 25 to 30 percent additional for “soft costs” like fees and contingencies.
That does not include the cost of renovating the current courthouse, which was estimated between $650,000 and $750,000.
The renovations and building costs would be paid for with property taxes.
The courthouse, built in 1874, is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Several years ago, taxpayers led a successful remonstrance to reject a plan to add a large addition onto the back of the building, paid for with property taxes.
“We want to try to make sure to do everything we possibly can to make sure that the historic courthouse remains a county facility and that it isn’t sold and used for something,” said DLZ principal architect Eric Ratts.
If a new justice center were to be put the near the law enforcement center, land would have to be raised 2 to 3 feet to get it out of the flood zone. However, the county already owns that land, so that’s a plus, and no other property would be taken off the tax rolls to put it on, commissioner Diana Biddle said.
One of the primary reasons for a new justice center is that the county continues to face space crunches. The prosecutor’s office also has environmental problems and needs to be torn down, Biddle said.
A new justice center would also give office space to the Guardian Ad Litem program and public defenders. Public defenders meet clients at McDonald’s and GAL volunteers work out of their cars, Biddle said.
The bell tower at the courthouse also is in need of repair. A bid to repair it was $35,000, Biddle said.
“We have those issues that we need to address. We either address them collectively or we start addressing them individually. Either way, it would cost us more money,” she said.
“I don’t care how we choose to fix the problem, but there are problems that aren’t going to go away. We have to look at a solution.”
Paying for it
Jason Semler, the county’s financial consultant with Baker Tilly Municipal Advisors, presented an analysis on how the county could pay for a new justice center without raising property taxes.
The analysis assumed that the county would take out a $10 million bond for this project. After funding interest during construction, that would leave about $9 million for the project itself, Semler said.
The analysis also factored in the county taking out $2 million bonds for capital projects every four years, such as road paving and bridge repair.
The county took out a bond around 2002 to pay for the new jail. It will be paid off in 2030.
Under the Baker Tilly plan, the county would pay around $400,000 a year on the justice center bond if it’s taken out in 2020. Once the jail bond is paid off in 2030, then the county could start paying the principal interest on the justice center bond. That is when payments would go up to around $960,000 a year before increasing again to around $1.2 million until the bond is paid off in 2039.
The analysis keeps the tax rate at around 10 cents per $100 of assessed property value until 2034. At that point, the tax rate dips down to around 8 cents if the county doesn’t take another bond out for other capital projects such as roads.
Semler said the one drawback of structuring the debt this way is that paying little principal interest for 16 years causes the county to ultimately pay more interest over time.
He said that a lot of counties pay for projects like a justice center by increasing income taxes because they don’t want to increase property taxes.
Brown County’s income tax rate is already among the top 10 counties in the state.
Biddle said that a desire to not raise taxes is why she asked Semler to look into incremental financing.
Other projects?
Commissioner Jerry Pittman asked about any other large projects that might be “looming out there” that would require a $10 million bond like this one. Biddle and council Vice President Dave Critser both mentioned bridge work.
Last August, USI Consultants presented a report stating that Brown County was looking at more than $9 million worth of bridge work that will need to be done in the next nine years.
At that time, Brown County Highway Superintendent Mike Magner said the total price tag was likely to go down because some projects will be done locally and not to federal standards.
The report estimated that replacing 14 bridges in the county over the next nine years would cost $7.5 million. The cost to rehab six bridges would be $1.8 million. The deck rehabilitation or replacement of three bridges was estimated at $625,000.
Biddle said March 4 that money for bridges is in the cumulative bridge fund. According to a comprehensive plan Semler presented later on in the meeting, that fund had $987,504 in it at the end of 2018. Council member Darren Byrd said that all of the money in that fund couldn’t be used for the repairs and replacements, since they still have to maintain other bridges.
The county is currently paying off a $2 million bond to pay for road paving. Biddle said that once the remaining 100 miles of county roads are paved, any future bond money like that could then be used for bridge repairs.
‘Move forward’
At the conclusion of Semler’s justice center financing presentation, Critser told commissioners Biddle and Pittman to move forward. “You just need to go ahead and move forward with this project. That’s all there is to it,” he said.
Council President Dave Redding said he needed time to process the information and might have additional questions, such as what the county’s needs will be if population projections hold true.
“If this feels like we’re growing, but all the trends say we’re shrinking, so have we got that balance and reconcile?” he asked.
Biddle said that the amount of court filings are increasing. “When we had a population of 16,000 people, we had fewer cases being filed than what we have now. But it’s a whole different social demographic now,” she said.
Redding said that makes for a “pretty strong argument that there were some services that were never adequately staffed and housed to an acceptable standard.”
Critser asked if Semler had included maintenance for a new justice center in the comprehensive plan. Semler said they had not planned for increases to the budgets the county has now for maintenance, except to adjust for inflation.
“There’s no sense in building a facility if you can’t put electricity in it without laying off five people. What is that going to accomplish?” Critser said.
Pittman said the new justice center would be energy efficient and would help cut down on those costs.
Critser said that when the new law enforcement center was built, the county council petitioned the Department of Local Government Finance to raise the maximum tax levy to take care of the new building.
Semler said he would look into that possibility.
Any other options?
Pittman said he was still willing to have public meetings to get input on the plans and ideas on how to address space needs, especially at the Brown County Prosecutor’s Office where employees are getting sick due to the condition of the building.
“I don’t like the idea of borrowing $10 million, obligating my children who are living in this county and grandchildren who continue to. But honestly, does anybody have a more cost-effective solution than building a new facility? I’d love to hear it,” he said.
Public meetings have not been scheduled yet.
Pittman said the “Band-Aid approaches” of possibly buying different buildings, like the former First Merchants Bank or Nashville Police Department, to put county offices in as needed would just require the county to spend more money in the future.
Byrd asked what it would cost to rebuild the prosecutor’s office. Biddle said it would be about $250 a square foot and she thought the office is about 2,000 square feet.
“We have to be sure that if we’re growing our footprint, it aligns with whatever we’re seeing in tax base changes, assessed value,” Redding said.
Redding said that he didn’t want the commissioners and the rest of council to misinterpret his questions as not being supportive of a justice center.
“It’s just people are counting on us to know the answers to these questions and be able to explain,” he said.
“It doesn’t take anybody any time at all to walk around where we house some of these government services and realize they have never been properly placed in a sufficient work environment for what we expect of them. Then, if people are getting sick, that lends itself to liability,” he said.
