The Kootenai County Board of Commissioners hopes a new $36 million expansion to the county's justice building will provide more room for county employees and make it easier for community members to find the proper courtroom. The four-level, 60,000-square-foot expansion, which started construction in September 2023, is expected to be finished by May.
The expansion will add three courtrooms with additional jury and side chamber spaces. The Kootenai County Prosecutor's Office, which is currently spread across four buildings, will also be housed on the third level. Plus, there will be space for some District Court, sheriff's office and other county employees.
The commissioners initially approved the Justice Center expansion in 2020 with a $22 million price tag. In June 2022, the commissioners allocated $24 million in American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA funds for the project.
In August 2022, the county hired Bouten Construction, a company that builds hospitals, schools and research facilities around the Pacific Northwest. The price tag quickly grew to $36 million in 2023, and the county is expected to use its own funds for the cost difference.
Bouten presented commissioners with an option to remove the third level to reduce costs, eliminating the space for the Prosecutor's Office, but the commissioners ultimately moved forward with the original design.
Kootenai County Commissioner Leslie Duncan blamed inflation, citing increases in the cost of construction materials and labor between the time of the design's first approval and when Bouten started construction and subcontracted work to third-party builders.
"We only allocated about $22 million in the beginning, and that didn't turn out to be enough because of the hyperinflation that we went through and the labor shortage, along with materials costing more, and the supply chain issues," Duncan says. "So that was not nearly enough to be put towards the project."
The building's new $36 million cost was alarming for Commissioner Bruce Mattare, who was elected in 2022.
In October 2023, he raised concerns that the county's auditing staff wasn't being kept in the loop and argued that the county needed to hire someone to monitor fees. Since then, Mattare says the county has been able to be more transparent with the public about any cost changes. The auditing and finance departments are more engaged in the process, and the county hired David Mendez to be a buyer's representative on behalf of the commissioners in December 2023.
Mendez is from Turner and Townsend Heery, which specializes in project and program management for public sector organizations. He can approve expenditures up to $25,000 for the project, and he's being paid $155 per hour and will receive more than $155,000 for his work in 2024.
Mattare says it is important to have a dedicated person with experience managing government construction projects on the team. He felt that being unable to get an answer about total costs was a significant issue, and he is glad to see the project moving forward with clarity on costs.
"I kept asking, how much is this project going to cost in total?" Mattare says, "and I would get different numbers every time. We're responsible for the fiscal management of the county treasury, and to engage in a project that you don't know what your ceiling is as far as how much we could end up spending is irresponsible."
MAKING SPACE
The building is well underway, with drywall added, and windows installed.
In a Nov. 19 status update, the commissioners approved reallocating $480,000 of ARPA funding originally designated for temporary county salaries to the justice building expansion.
The project will address many issues with Kootenai County's fast growth, which has come with increased caseloads.
Duncan says the county has had to make do with limited space: A closet space was converted into a courtroom, judges were packed in the old 1925 courthouse blocks away from the main county campus, and 60 district clerk employees were crammed in an open office area sharing two single bathrooms.
"We had only four jury trial rooms for 17 judges — we've got 14 home judges and three other [traveling] judges who regularly hear cases weekly in Kootenai County," Duncan says. "So we had to expand courtrooms, especially jury trial ones."
One important element of the project is that it puts the entire prosecuting staff in one building, Kootenai County Prosecutor Stanley Mortensen says.
In the 11 years Mortensen has worked for the county, his staff has nearly doubled in size, and their workspace is currently bursting at the seams.
"I have three attorneys sharing one office right now," Mortensen says. "I have two attorneys who are in what used to be two closets."
When Kootenai County moved from physical files to digital, the former filing cabinet rooms were quickly converted to desk space, Mortensen says.
According to a 2023 report, the average annual criminal caseload for Kootenai County prosecutors was 197 per year, compared with the industry standard of 150. The misdemeanor caseload averaged 644 per attorney, with 400 cases a year being the standard.
Mortensen wants to add more prosecutors to the office but hasn't requested approval for more attorneys because there's nowhere to put them. He says the new space will allow him to request additional attorneys, lower the caseload per attorney, and be flexible to handle high-profile cases.
"When you can reduce the caseloads of each individual attorney, it allows them to spend more time focusing on some of the more high-profile cases," he says.
The case dockets for Kootenai County judges are also among the highest in Idaho, he says, making it take longer to move cases along.
"Judges need to have courtrooms so that they can have hearings and get the attorneys and the parties in the court to work on these cases," Mortensen says. "When you have more judges than you have actual courtrooms, it hinders the ability of the judges to move these cases along.
Duncan says the building expansion, which has been needed for a long time, addresses these current justice needs. By 2027, Kootenai County may add another District Court judge and a magistrate judge to replace a traveling judge.
Mortensen says the community of Kootenai County supports the work his office does and he is thankful the commissioners pushed the project forward.
"I'm very grateful for the work the commissioners did to approve building the new [justice] building," Mortensen says. "I'm grateful that they were able to find funding, and I really look forward to moving my office over there and how much it will improve our working conditions." ♦
