>> COUNTY GOVERNMENT
Jury trials in the Superior Court of Baldwin County will proceed more efficiently when renovation work in the lower level of the courthouse is completed.
County Manager Carlos Tobar said this week the ‘basement’ will soon be available for court activities. The large room on that level has been used in the past for a variety of events, such as county Christmas parties and receptions for government-related events.
One particular problem that helped drive the effort to make the room available for Superior Court use was insufficient space to accommodate jury panels in court trials.
“The biggest reason we haven’t been able to use that space as a jury assembly room before now is we didn’t have any restrooms down there. We’re getting them built now,” Tobar said, adding he is hopeful the work will be done by the end of August.
The jury assembly problem led to court and county officials looking outside the courthouse for space.
“They started coming to the Baldwin County Government Building in June,” Tobar said, explaining that the selection of trial jurors took place there. Those picked to serve on the jury were then sent back to the courthouse."
“When we get the restrooms done, that will alleviate that problem,” he added.
Superior Court Clerk Mitch Longino said that before the recent move to the government building for jury selection, the size of the courtrooms was the problem.
“When we have jury trials upstairs, we have to have the first 50 (jurors) or so come in the main courtroom, which is about all it will hold,” Longino said. “Then we have to put people down there in another courtroom to wait; then we have to switch them back and forth.
“But, if we get that jury room, everybody can go down there, and we can call up the ones that need to come up,” he explained. “That will alleviate the need for the other courtrooms, and they’ll be able to use them for other things rather than just having a jury sitting in there.”
Tobar said the new space will be used for more than selecting juries.
“It will be a multi-purpose room,” Tobar said. “It will be used for hearings, possibly juvenile court and state court proceedings; not trials necessarily, but other proceedings. It will just make the courthouse more efficient.”
A visit to the downstairs area, in the past, would lead to the encounter of stacks and stacks of files. While a considerable number of those files are gone now, many boxes from different offices remain there today.
“Our stuff is mostly digital now, and some has been discarded,” Tobar said. “But more still needs to be digitized.”
Future plans call for the use of the space now occupied by storage boxes.
“The restrooms we are designing are being designed with the eye for a very large courtroom downstairs,” Tobar said. “That will be the largest courtroom in the courthouse. It will be built with funds from the next Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (SPLOST), which begins next April. That will be one of the last projects of that SPLOST, five to six years down the road.”
In the meantime, other space is already being used for court functions as a result of the current SPLOST. When the government building opened on North Columbia Street, the offices of the tax commissioner, tax assessors, and voter registrar relocated there.
Tobar said the Probate and Magistrate Court’s offices now use the space those offices vacated, with two courtrooms and a multi-purpose room now available.
“I tell people we played musical chairs with our county offices,” said Tobar.
The other part of the renovation is taking place on the courthouse’s fourth floor, where all three courtrooms are being upgraded.
“Work on Courtroom 1 is already underway,” Tobar said. “There will be a new HVAC, new flooring, and new seating. The work on all three should be done by the end of October.”