Water Street location less than two blocks from Kent addition

Delaware State News

DOVER — The Kent County Courthouse parking problem may have been conquered.

"We came, we saw, we parked," joked Robert Furman, state director of facilities management, who reported Tuesday that his agency has decided to create a parking lot on Water Street, less than two blocks from where a major addition to the courthouse is under construction.

Development of the proposed parking facility could head off a city threat to withhold an occupancy permit for the courthouse addition until the state meets Dover’s off-street-parking requirements.

Mr. Furman told the Downtown Dover Partnership’s parking committee that the new lot would consist of land between State Street and Governors Avenue now occupied by a Delaware Department of Transportation bus station and by adjoining property that is for sale. DelDOT plans to relocate the station to a larger parcel farther west on Water Street in early 2011, not long before the courthouse expansion is to open.

Mr. Furman said later that the proposed lot probably would accommodate 170 to 180 cars. That’s short of the 215 spaces required for the 150,000-square-foot addition, but Dover Planning Commission can waive the requirement in exchange for a "cash in lieu" payment to cover the cost of eventual development of parking spaces elsewhere.

Parking at the new lot would be free, which Mr. Furman noted is traditional in the capital complex.

"As soon as people see it’s free," committee chairman Thomas G. Smith said, "everybody and his uncle will be there."

Mr. Furman said signs can be posted to note that the lot is for people working in and visiting the courthouse, but he does not anticipate a crackdown on others using it.

The completion of the courthouse addition may generate no immediate demand for more parking. While the courthouse will be four times larger than it is today, the number of cases heard there will not necessarily increase. The expansion is designed primarily to relieve congestion in the current building, where storage space is limited and hallways and courtrooms often are crowded with defendants, witnesses, attorneys and court personnel.

Mr. Smith said the proposed lot will not address one of the committee’s chief concerns: ensuring future parking demands will be met in the Loockerman Street business district.

"That will have no effect on Loockerman Street. That’s way too far" from most downtown stores and restaurants, he said. It is three blocks from Loockerman Street.

In order to build awareness of parking in the Loockerman Street vicinity, the committee Tuesday approved the installation of a number of signs to direct motorists to parking lots. It also voted to post a sign at each lot stating the kind of parking available there, whether free, metered, by permit or some combination of those conditions.

At the city’s Bradford Street lot, new signs are to contain better explanations of how to pay for metered parking. Meters there are contained in a single structure rather than at each space.

In a related matter, the committee voted to again provide free parking during late November and in December at the metered spaces in the Bradford Street lot. The free parking would begin on the day after Thanksgiving.

Despite budget concerns, rain, completion set for July 2011

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.