Courthouse grand opening set for June 21

SANDPOINT — The protracted odyssey of the Bonner County Courthouse remodel is finally coming to an end.

The county announced that it has set a grand opening ceremony and open house for the extensively overhauled building for Friday, June 21.

A number of a reopening dates have come and gone since the renovation began in 2008 so is there a chance the county may miss the latest reopening date?

“No,” Commissioner Mike Nielsen said without the slightest bit of hesitation and adding that the board has signed a certificate of substantial completion for the project.

“We are starting to move in,” said Nielsen.

The ceremony starts at noon and features a presentation of colors by the Boy and Girl scouts of America, and an invocation by Pastor Ken Smith.

The building is not expected to open to the public until early July due to the volume of court files and other items that need to be moved back into the century-old facility.

The drab, dingy and creaky interior of the courthouse is gone. So is the rumpus room wall paneling in the district courtroom that was stained by the heads of countless jurors and defendants resting against it.

Also gone is any trace of asbestos, vermiculite and black mold, according to Nielsen.

“It will be like a professional office building,” he said.

The courthouse will also have vastly improved security for staff and judges, safer ingress and egress points in the event of a fire and an elevator for disabled visitors.

The project continues to be dogged by perceptions that it is a boondoggle that Ginno Construction milked through repeated change orders.

However, Nielsen said Ginno actually helped keep costs down and every single one of the nearly 30 change orders were pursued by the county, not the contractor.

The project ultimately cost taxpayers $6.5 million, a million or two less than it would have cost to build anew. Moreover, the county would still have been responsible for asbestos abatement if it walked away from the building.

The county initially intended to do the renovation in phases until the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ordered the structure to be abated for asbestos. The county collapsed the three-phase project into a single phase to avoid a continuous cycle of building, stopping and demolishing.

“More than half the cost was to bring the building from 1908 to 2013 construction standards,” Nielsen said.