Broken boilers are Justice Center’s latest malady

By Brian Eckhouse

Saturday, April 19, 2008 | 2 a.m.

The beat goes on at the Regional Justice Center.

Arbitration is under way between the county and the original contractor over which side owes the other tens of millions of dollars for a 2 1/2-year-old courthouse with mounting problems above and beyond the structural flaws that have beguiled county employees from Day One.

This week, a whole new headache reached the desk of county maintenance officials. Both of the building’s boilers are busted, and won’t be operational again until the end of next week at the earliest, said Frank Wheat Jr., who manages the courthouse for the county. The boilers are in a small building across Clark Avenue from the Justice Center.

They have occasionally broken, but never at the same time, officials said. The valley’s hard water is being blamed.

With both of them out, the courthouse has no hot water to pump into the cafe on the ground level or the bathrooms on the building’s 17 floors, Wheat said.

But he insisted the plates and silverware at the restaurant are still being sanitized: “They’re having to boil hot water on the stove, treat the dishes, then wash them.”

In the short term the biggest expense will be labor, just to get the boilers working again. Down the line, however, the county plans to buy strainers to capture tiny particles to improve water flow, Wheat said. The costs are unknown.

The boilers also play a role in the building’s temperature. When the boilers aren’t working properly, the climate control system is thrown out of balance and the building is too cold.

The solution for that is less taxing: parkas. Observed Sun reporter Mary Manning, who was tapped for jury duty last week: “We ... all looked like we might travel to Alaska.” Other jurors this week theorized that the courtrooms were being kept cold to try to ensure that everyone stayed awake.

Some judges are growing increasingly displeased and vocal about the problems, which include a mysterious stink in the basement that sometimes works its way to the upper floors. The elevators are another matter. Again this week, an inmate elevator was out of commission.

Two months ago, District Court Judge Jackie Glass, in open court, encouraged reporters to investigate the elevator problems. On Wednesday, she complained about the elevators as well as the boiler pipes to a Sun editor after his jury service. (Apparently judges and attorneys have a use for journalists after all.)

The arbitration is expected to last only through June, however, so it is likely to end long before officials figure out how to keep the courthouse elevators operational.

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Last month, the Sun reported that at least 35,000 homes built in the Las Vegas Valley, as well as tens of thousands across the Southwest, have defective brass pipe fittings that over time tend to corrode and can explode.

This has prompted class action lawsuits across the region, with the largest here in Clark County. Local plaintiffs expect developers who used the faulty Kitec fittings to pay for the replumbing of their homes, which costs between $6,000 and $8,000.

As expected, District Judge Tim Williams has tentatively approved a $10.2 million settlement with about 1,250 owners of homes built by Richmond American Homes of Nevada. Williams is scheduled to make a final determination June 6 on that settlement, which would cover replumbing.

•••

Criminal proceedings on an allegation of a particularly despicable theft are to resume next week.

Joseph Planck, a firefighter accused of stealing money donated for Hurricane Katrina victims, is scheduled to appear Wednesday for a pretrial hearing, 25 months after being indicted. His trial is slated to begin the following Monday.

Planck, who had managed charity funds before for the department, allegedly stole thousands of dollars from a firefighters’ boot drive in the aftermath of the hurricane’s battering of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in August 2005.

The story attracted more media attention when Planck’s attorney and others alleged that other local firefighters had benefited financially from a burn foundation.

The prosecution of Planck was turned over to the attorney general’s office because, as the Sun’s Tony Cook reported last fall, Planck’s uncle was the neighbor of District Attorney David Roger.

Ah, Vegas.