Grant County weighs renovating historic courthouse or building new $35M judicial campus

Grant County officials reviewed two design options on Oct. 9 for the district courthouse: renovating the existing historic courthouse with a west-side addition, or demolishing an existing detention center and building a new judicial campus on the same site.

Architect Tom Wilbur of NCA Architects presented design-development drawings and construction-only estimates. “That total came out to $19,000,923 or $727.34 a square foot” for the renovation and addition, he said. For a new building he gave a construction estimate of about $35,000,000, or $893.58 per square foot.

The renovation option would require the historic courthouse to be fully vacated during construction. Wilbur said the county would likely need 18 months of temporary facilities for courts and affected staff: “the existing building cannot be occupied at all during construction.” He described design constraints in a renovation: historic-preservation limits on changes to the east elevation, meeting Americans with Disabilities Act and modern fire and building codes, and challenges fitting program spaces into…