Peoples' Court

Public Comfort is Central to New Galveston County Justice Center

By Jennifer Hiller

A $92 million justice center under construction in Galveston will house courthouse, jail and law enforcement facilities on the same campus and create a convenient central point for county services near the entrance to Galveston Island.

The Galveston County Justice Center includes a 1,200-bed jail, a new courts facility for county and district courts and a law-enforcement building that will be shared by the sheriff's office and the Galveston Police Department.

A joint venture between Houston-based Gilbane Building Co. and Galveston-based J.W. Kelso Construction is providing construction-management services for the 605,000-sq.-ft. justice center.

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Corridors in the Court

Gilbane-Kelso broke ground on the three buildings in January 2004. All of the buildings are under construction simultaneously, and the 24-month construction project is scheduled to complete in February 2006, said John Ros, vice president and operations manager at Gilbane.

The concrete and steel buildings were designed to withstand hurricane-force winds, as well as weather the island's harsh salt air, Ros said. The four-story courthouse is the justice center's tallest and most visible structure and will house 14 district courts and support offices.

Dudley Anderson, associate with Bay Architects of Houston, said the project is the largest direct-supervision facility under construction in the country now.

The courthouse exterior is masonry veneer, with cast-stone units similar to limestone covering the majority of the front of the building. Architects chose Valley tan bricks for the sides of the building - a light beige material that is already in wide use on the island. The front of the courthouse has a colonnade and a glass dome that will be lit at night.

"It goes back to historic Galveston," Anderson said. "It's sensitive to the island's buildings, but it's not a historical structure."

Inside the courthouse, a corridor system in the back of the building allows staff members to move between offices out of sight from the public. Inmates will come to the courthouse through a secure tunnel system underneath the building. And members of the public will move about through the front of the building, where curtain walls will provide a view of the Moody Gardens pyramid, the causeway and Galveston Bay.

"We've made moving around the building less stressful. It's more secure," Anderson said. "When somebody from the public comes in, wherever they are, they will be able to see outside. We wanted this to be open with sunshine. It's an open government idea."

Similarly, Anderson said the entrance to the law enforcement building uses glass to create an expansive - and unintimidating - entrance.

Following Directions

The buildings connect by breezeways and underground tunnels, but the entrance to each one faces a different direction. Doug Bull, senior project manager with Gilbane, said the breezeways are also used as a pipe chase to all buildings.

"We don't want anyone thinking they're going to the courthouse and accidentally walking into the jail," Anderson said. "The buildings are similar but separate. We don't want the penal part of the campus to be confused with the courthouse or law enforcement areas. We have them [facing] different directions. It will be clear where you are."

The campus runs along Broadway between 54th and 59th streets. Bull said the courthouse is placed at a 45-degree angle to 59th, making the building's façade visible to cars driving over the causeway onto the island. Because most of Galveston County's population lives on the mainland, county officials wanted to place the new structure as close to the island's entrance as possible, Bull said.

The 60-acre site, which recently housed several 80-year-old cotton warehouses, gave the county enough space to create a sprawling campus, although the new footprint is smaller than what the cotton warehouses occupied, Anderson said.

The available space allowed the architects to keep the jail facility a one-story structure - something that improves the safety for inmates and law enforcement officials.

"You don't have to move the inmates up and down stairs," Anderson said. "If you can move the inmates horizontally it makes life safer for the correctional officer."

Southern Crushed Concrete Inc. of Galveston salvaged concrete from the cotton warehouses and also saved more than 2.5 million ft. of hard pine lumber from the old buildings. Metal from the buildings was also salvaged, leaving little material other than some of the roof to be taken to a landfill, Anderson said.

Rehabilitation Efforts

Galveston County voters in 2000 approved a bond measure for the justice center. The jail will replace the county's current facility, which was built in 1963 and has been expanded twice to accommodate 700 prisoners. County officials started looking into building a new facility after estimating that it could cost upwards of $3 million a year to house Galveston County prisoners somewhere else.

The new 1,200-bed jail is projected to meet the county's needs until 2010 but can be expanded to 2,400 beds in the future, Anderson said.

The county's current courthouse is out of room, and it has courtrooms considered too small for district court operations. The addition of the new 405th District Court also put a strain on the county's existing facilities.

A key goal of Galveston County officials was to give local contractors a shot at doing work on the project. Construction managers broke the subcontracts >>

into dozens of small packages to give smaller firms a chance to compete, and about 60 firms - most of them from the Galveston/ Houston area - are now working on the project, Ros said. The subcontracts range in size from $46,000 to $10 million.

"We made a big effort to get the local community involved," Ros added. Gilbane and Kelso invited local firms and labor union officials to a job fair to give them information about the projects. They also allowed companies to bid on a variety of packages.

"We looked at how we could best package the work to attract minority subcontractors and local subcontractors," Ros said.

Weather has caused few delays on the project, and the job's timing has been lucky in another sense. "We bid just ahead of the big steel and concrete price increases," Ros said.