County officials say project necessary to address space, age concerns

FARMINGTON – Officials have continued to make a case for a major realignment of county facilities, attempting to illustrate to the public the challenges posed by work spaces they say are overcrowded and poorly supported by aging systems.

Franklin County officials and employees are looking ahead to the Nov. 2 elections, which will feature a local question of the ballot: Do voters want to approve a $4.46 million project to expand and improve county facilities? The second of three public meetings on the subject was held Thursday evening in Rangeley, with the final meeting scheduled for Oct. 13 at 7 p.m., in the Franklin County Courthouse itself.

The most significant part of the plan, financially, would be the purchase of Church Street Commons, and the shifting of several county functions into the former print shop and automobile showroom. The plan also encompasses some relatively modest adjustments to the courthouse building itself, moving the District Attorney’s Office and related personnel out of the basement and onto the main floor, as well as a roughly 1,800 square foot expansion of the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department office on the jail site in the Fairbanks section of Farmington.

Employees throughout every county department had the same general issue with their workspace, to varying degrees; everything is too old and, more importantly, too small. In the Franklin County Courthouse, the Probate Court is down to a single year of record space, and space constraints have forced the already-tightly packed court itself into an even smaller corner. The Registry of Deeds, perhaps the department that sees more access by the public than anyone, Registrar Susan Black said they were down to perhaps six months of space.

“Everything is just sort of everywhere,” Black said, standing in the main storage vault. Older books are stored in the attic, part of the courthouse that Greg Roux, who’s in charge of the county’s maintenance, says isn’t accessible to the public. The larger maps and plans are stored in the poorly-ventilated basement.

Also in the basement are the assistant district attorney’s offices, accessible through corridors that weave past vaults, PCP piping and furnace rooms. The floor isn’t adequately ventilated, and Roux uses a network of fans and dehumidifiers to try and maintain county records. Due to drainage issues and a lack of moving air, mold has been an issue recently in the offices.

County officials say their biggest concerns lie with the state Fire Marshal’s Office, which found the building had a number of violations following an inspection earlier this year. The county invested more than $30,000 of materials and labor in a series of measures to address the violations, including fire safety doors, railings, new locks and handles to comply with the American’s with Disabilities Act, which satisfied the agency in the short term. However, officials believe that if the county were to continue to use the courthouse, major renovations would be needed to meet code.

“If we don’t move,” Roux said, “they said they’d be back.”

Those renovations include a new HVAC system, proper stairwell towers and replacing the elevator and other mechanical systems. Roux estimated that the cost would be at least $2 million to $3 million, in order to maintain the space they have now, minus space lost to a larger elevator, bigger stairwells that meet state codes and other improvements.

“The problem is, with the [state Fire Marshal’s Office] code,” Roux said, “if you fix one thing you have to fix everything.”

Purchasing the Commons, the building committee believes, is the cheapest way to fix the problem in the long term. Under the plan, Registry of Deeds, the department with the most foot traffic, would be on the first floor. On the second floor would be the Probate Court and related functions, with both floors having adequate space and support for file storage in the foreseeable future.

The plan calls for the small, wood frame, annex adjacent to the brick building to be torn down and replaced with a two-story building. That building would provide the elevator, required to make the facility handicap accessible, and would serve as home for county administration functions, on the second floor, and Franklin County Emergency Management Agency office space, on the first floor.

That would move FCEMA out of the courthouse basement, as well as providing a space for a disaster-related coordination center in the basement of the Church Street Commons area. Basically an open room with some communication equipment, the space would provide FCEMA and first responders a base of operations during a major storm or other disaster. During the 24-hour emergency drill, organized by the Maine Emergency Management Agency in October 2009, MEMA officials praised the local EMA staff but noted their current operations center was inadequate in terms of space, ease of communication and had no backup power source.

A smaller piece of the project would involve the so-called “white house,” the office space used by dispatchers and staff of the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department. Constructed hastily in the mid-1990s after changes at the Franklin County Jail left sheriff department staff with no workspace, the building is roughly 2,000 square feet and supports a full-time staff of 30.

“I can’t even have a department meeting,” Sheriff Dennis Pike joked, saying the department often had to borrow space at the Farmington town office. “We just don’t have the space.”

A string of small, walk-through offices loop through the single-story building, each shared by two or more officers. The dispatch center, which has been a particular concern of county commissioners, isn’t adequately secure, nor are the communication or computer arrays. Officers have to conduct interviews in the same place they write reports and catalog evidence, which is stored in a series of shipping containers outside.

The plan calls for the building to be expanded by roughly 1,800 square feet, creating a secure space for the dispatch offices at the new rear of the building. Sheriff’s department functions could then slide into the space vacated by dispatch, roughly 40 percent of the existing building’s space, giving them a temporary solution to the space shortage.

The question which will appear on the Nov. 2 ballot will ask voters to approve the bonding of the $4,465,000 project at a rate of 2.8 percent. Paying an average of $294,000 annually for 20 years, the building committee has estimated that a Franklin County taxpayer would see an annual increase of $6.60 per $100,000 of property value, if the project is approved. The committee is hoping to move ahead quickly, as the 2.8 percent interest rate is contingent on federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding that will likely not be available next year.