Delaware State News
DOVER — The expansion of Kent County Courthouse is on schedule, the state official overseeing the project said Tuesday.
"The rain has not been helping, but hasn’t put us behind schedule, either," Robert Furman, director of facilities management, reported. "Nason Construction has done a great job of working in the rain and around the rain."
Nason Construction Inc. of Wilmington is the contractor on the approximately $70 million addition, which will more than quadruple the size of the notoriously cramped courthouse on South State Street on The Green.
The finished product will stretch to Federal Street and provide 148,800 square feet for courts and related agencies. A 3,600-square-foot structure will join the new section with the 46,000-square-foot original.
The three-story addition is due for completion in July 2011. It will include seven courtrooms for Superior Court, Court of Common Pleas and Court of Chancery and offices for the attorney general, the public defender, Capitol Police, the Kent County sheriff and other agencies.
While rain has not thwarted progress, the recession could. But financing of the project has been adequate so far, Mr. Furman said.
Nearly $52 million has been allocated, including funds to purchase the courthouse and the now-razed O’Brien Building from Kent County. The O’Brien building, which housed offices that have been relocated to the Kent Levy Court Administrative Complex on Bay Road, occupied the site where the addition is being built.
Approximately $25 million more is needed, Mr. Furman said, including $13.2 million Gov. Jack A. Markell has recommended for inclusion in the state budget that will take effect July 1.
The state legislature must decide this month how to cope with diminished revenues in meeting a legal requirement that the budget be balanced. But if funding for the courthouse addition is interrupted, the effect on the project might not be apparent to a casual passerby.
"There’s enough money to keep going to complete the shell of the courthouse so that it looks complete from the outside," Mr. Furman said.
Parking for the addition is to be provided on Water Street at what is now a Delaware Department of Transportation bus station. DelDOT’s station is to be replaced by one farther west on Water Street that will accommodate not only the state buses that stop at the existing facility, but Greyhound and Trailways buses as well.
DelDOT spokesman Mike Williams said work on the new station is to begin around this time next year and finish eight to 10 months later — a few months before the courthouse addition’s scheduled completion.
