Courthouse projects nearing completion

The Hamilton County Courthouse will go dark on this upcoming long Thanksgiving weekend, and not only because county offices will be closed Thursday through Sunday for the holiday. The 130-year-old structure will be literally dark – as in with no electrical power – starting after closing Wednesday and for a number of hours Thursday and Friday, hopefully to be restored sometime Saturday in time for the Come Home for Christmas Celebration. 
The reason for the intentional power outage is the need to install a new main electrical panel inside the mechanical room on the ground floor which will pave the way for finishing up work on the new fire suppression pump  also housed in that room. 
County Business Administrator Pat Shaw said last week, the plan is to have NPPD shut off power to the building at about 5 p.m. Wednesday. He said an auxiliary heating system powered by a generator will carry warm air into the building to keep things from freezing while the power is out and a crew from Juzyk Electric will work the next two to three days to replace the large main electrical panel and make other changes.
“We’re hoping Saturday, it’s ready to go, but if Saturday doesn’t do it, they’ve still got a little bit of Sunday if they need it, so then they’ll get all that done and NPPD will turn it back on,” he said. “And then, with the conclusion of that, our fire pump and everything in that fire pump room should be almost 100 percent complete at that point.”
Shaw said the hope is to have the power restored by Saturday afternoon in time for the tree lighting and other events surrounding Come Home to Christmas.

Reopening the front doors
Meanwhile, the workers from Kingery Construction in Lincoln are working early this week to get the east steps of the courthouse finished up so that the new electrical panel can be brought in through the front doors. 
As of last week an enclosure had been built over the front doors using lumber and plastic sheeting so that the landing at the top of the steps could be heated with a space heater in order that the final work could be done on the area outside the doors. A layer of concrete was poured on the new deeper landing, the heating wires for snow and ice removal were laid in and work began on laying tiles early this week. Once the landing is finished, Kingery site supt. Eric Brown said temporary protective sheeting will be put down so that workers can move the electrical panel inside more easily. 
“Basically the steps are probably 90 percent done, and then the concrete will have to be laid around the base,” Shaw said. “ And then once everything’s done on there, then we can open it back up.”
Some have questioned the decision to build the new steps out of granite rather than some less expensive material, but Shaw explained that granite was used because that’s what the original courthouse steps were made of before they were replaced sometime in the 20th Century using concrete blocks for a base. Those new steps had allowed water infiltration over the years which led to the need for them to be replaced. Shaw said Berggren Architects had worked to recreate the original steps using photos from the building’s early days, in keeping with its original architecture. 
“So it’s kind of to recreate the old look of it, to keep it like it was originally,” Shaw said. “And granite steps let us put in the heating elements, and they’ll last a lot longer than concrete too.”
Shaw said the final step in the construction of the new steps will be to install a new center handrail made of stainless steel. 
Brown said he hopes work on replacing the west side steps can start soon, saying progress will depend on the weather, however, he expects to work through the winter months to get that project done. He said he also expects that job will go much faster, because of what they learned when the east steps were torn off. 
“We already have an idea of where things are and it doesn’t look like the damage is as bad as  on this side, which is surprising, since that’s the side that gets most of the moisture,” he said. “But we’ll be able to jump in there and hopefully make this go a lot quicker on the next phase. But just getting started we were dealing with the fire escape... so we picked the hard side first. So it took us a little bit longer to get going... So we plan on working through the winter, through the cold weather... The only thing that might get pushed back is maybe some of the stone that needs to be replaced might get done come spring based if we can get the stone before it snows in Colorado.”
Brown said the red sandstone to replace those blocks will come from Lyons, Colo. which is located in the foothills of the Rockies northwest of Denver and is the same area from which the original stones of the building came. 
“It’s a one lane road up to the mine and one lane down,” he said. “So they have to close the road to get semi up there, so it’s dependent on the weather.”

Drainage system
While much progress has been made on a third part of the renovation project, completion of a new drainage system to carry runoff water away from the building’s foundation will have to wait until spring. During the work inside and on the east steps, workers have also been digging around the exterior of the building on the east and south sides. A ground level concrete drainage gutter is being constructed around the outer walls of the courthouse which will be covered by a grate to keep out leaves and other debris. They will collect and channel rainwater that runs down the side of the building. In addition they will be connected via PVC pipes to several large concrete storm sewer boxes situated several feet out from the foundation and, thirdly, water coming down the building’s roof downspouts will run into the system as well. All the water from the east and south sides of the building will be channeled around to the northeast side where it will be channeled underground into a storm drain on the northeast corner of the square.

Extension building progress
Work has also been progressing on the new building at the fairgrounds that will become home to the Hamilton County Extension office which is currently located on the ground floor of the courthouse. A progress update on that project will be featured in next week’s ANR.