People have opinions about everything, including where and where not to put up a storage building. Cook County Maintenance Director Brian Silence reported to county commissioners Tuesday, August 10, 2010 some of the opinions people have expressed to him regarding putting up a garage in the parking lot on the old Gunflint Trail (5th Avenue West) across the street from the courthouse. Members of the public don’t want the county to lose any parking space there, Silence said, and some of the neighbors don’t want to look at a garage.
The courthouse basement is running out of room for both department storage and maintenance equipment. Silence said the county has been renting storage space in a residential garage across the street, but he wants to stop spending money on rent.
Silence suggested the possibility of locating a garage where the old jail now sits near the northeast corner of the courthouse grounds. The cement is crumbling around the windows and the cement walls are cracking, he said. The Cook County Historical Society has expressed a desire to move the building to the property on which its headquarters and museum stand in downtown Grand Marais, Silence said. He wasn’t sure such a building could be moved, however. Commissioners wondered if the building is on the National Register of Historic Places. The registry website has the Cook County Courthouse on its list but does not mention the old jail. Another option discussed was demolishing the old jail building to make room for a storage building.
“People would think it was the most benevolent jail anywhere,” Commissioner Fritz Sobanja said, “right down there on the beach.” Relocating the jail downtown would probably result in restoration of the building, Sobanja said, would add an attraction to downtown Grand Marais, and would leave room for Maintenance Department storage on courthouse grounds.
Sobanja said he has heard from people who don’t want to see the proposed garage be too big. Silence, on the other hand, said he wants to make sure what they build will be big enough. Commissioner Bruce Martinson said that in the last 20 years, the county has repeatedly paid a price for constructing new facilities—such as the courthouse addition and the Law Enforcement Center—with too little storage space.
Commissioner Bob Fenwick suggested that they wait and include storage space in the community center that is being planned for county property on the corner of 5th Street and 4th Avenue West just west of Cook County High School. The board took no action on the need for garage space, but after the meeting Silence expressed support for the idea of holding off on a new building and including storage space in a new community center facility.
In a related matter, County Attorney Tim Scannell talked to the board about moving to the courthouse basement some of the files it is required to keep. This would help free up some space for a passageway that could lead directly into the office next door, where he would like to see the victim/witness coordinator’s officelocated. Theguardian ad litem office is currently in that space. Scannell said having Victim/Witness Coordinator Susan Maiala in a separate office across the hallway is “really inefficient” because she misses out on a lot of the ongoing dialogue that takes place in his office regarding cases.
Commissioners expressed openness to the idea but tabled the discussion for another day.
Leave a Reply