A $15 million renovation will allow jail inmates to be sentenced or spared in spaces where they were once locked behind bars.
The Greene County Commission voted 3-0 on Oct. 13 to enter into a $15 million professional services contract with NForm Architecture. The architects are tasked with the planning part of remodeling the former Greene County Jail and two adjacent courthouses to revamp the Greene County government campus on North Boonville Avenue.
NForm Architecture has already been working with Greene County on the preliminary design of a plan to reorganize government offices and expand court space in downtown Springfield.
Some work is underway already, and Greene County's director of resource management, Kevin Barnes, anticipates some cost savings as the work continues —especially in the part of the building that once housed jail cells. If the architect and the county government are able to save enough money, Barnes said they could pay for some “add-ons,” like an outdoor fence around part of the Greene County Medical Examiner's Office property.
“We really wanted to be able to get the architect on board to be able to catch up to what we’ve already done,” Barnes said. “This is a build-design instead of a design-build, we’ve already renovated part of this, but maybe it’ll be build-design-build.”
Greene County will also commit to paying an architectural fee on top of the money funded with the contract, which is about 7 percent of a maximum anticipated cost of $15 million. Greene County Budget Officer Jeff Scott noted that the $15 million makes up 79 percent of the funding that the Greene County Commission had allocated for the courthouse campus reconfiguration project.
“So that leaves about $4 million for anything and everything else,” Scott said.
Scott asked Barnes if there was a final dollar amount attached to the contract.
“There was a lot of discussion between the county counselor and the auditor about what that contract amount should be since we’ve set a budget lower than what the maximum should be,” Barnes said.
Second District Commissioner John C. Russell also wanted to see some more exact accounting.
“I just want to make sure that we’ve reserved enough for the other projects that we’ve put out into the community,” Russell said.
Plans announced in July
Prior to the opening of the new Greene County Sheriff’s Office and jail campus on West Division Street in May 2022, the Greene County sheriff had office spaces and staffers working in five different locations. The completed jail project set off a ripple effect.
A courthouse campus analysis and plan from 2015 underwent an update in 2021. Commissioners Bob Dixon, John C. Russell and Rusty MacLachlan announced the comprehensive reorganization plan for Greene County's government buildings July 29.
Part of the renovation proposal calls for Greene County to stop leasing office space on the 10th floor of the Cox Medical Tower, which would stop $107,000 in rental expenses per year. The Greene County Public Administrator and the county commission offices would move from the tower at Cox Medical Center North to offices in the Judicial Courts Facility on the north end of the courthouse campus.
The county commission would move to the second floor of the Greene County Historic Courthouse. The move would send the county’s information technology department across Boonville Avenue to the Public Safety Center. Greene County’s purchasing, human resources and juvenile administration departments would all be moved in the shuffle of the proposal.
The proposal calls for the Greene County Juvenile Justice Center to be demolished and the property to be turned into a parking lot. The juvenile courts, juvenile courtrooms and the Greene County Youth Academy would all be under the same roof on the first floor of the former jail.
Contractors are demolishing a temporary jail facility to create more parking. Some courthouse parking spaces along Boonville Avenue will be removed and turned into greenspace.
What used to be jail cells would be turned into courtroom space, with the specifications to be determined by Greene County’s circuit judges and their staff members. The county commission’s proposal takes the second story of the former jail and opens up a large space for new courtrooms.
At least 5 different buildings involved
With all of the moving parts and buildings involved, more than one officeholder and official is concerned with accounting and with delivering on the early plans announced in July.
“We’ve talked about some costs, but I just want to make sure we haven’t left anything out in the planning process, and we get to the end of this and not be able to build the entire scope out,” Russell said.
“We’ve left money for the Historic Courthouse, we’ve broken those down by pieces,” Barnes said. “What we hope to do as we work through working on the old jail is we hope to find savings there. At this point we’re just estimating a per-square-foot cost, and that’s our biggest pot of money but it’s also our biggest opportunity for savings.”
Final costs for the building projects aren’t exact. Scott asked for extra details in the accounting for each building on the campus.
“Even though this is covering multiple projects, multiple billings, does the contract provide for the architect to bill these hours out per project, or at least per building?” Scott asked. “If not, that’ll make some difficulties for the auditor in doing fixed asset reporting.”
“We can handle billing however it makes sense to you and the auditor,” Barnes said.
Barnes added that agreeing to a contract with NForm Architecture now will allow Greene County to meet Russell and Scott’s concerns.
“The point of getting the architect on board was so that we could work through some of those issues and identify some of those savings,” Barnes said. “Tackle the worst first, and any savings we bring from that we’ll add to those projects or have available for those projects.”
The same Greene County employees who oversaw the $150 million, 325,000-square-foot jail and sheriff’s office project on West Division Street are in charge of seeing the courthouse conversion proposal into its next phases.
