Henderson puts a rush on Justice Center parking garage

By Jeremy Twitchell

Wednesday, Feb. 4, 2009 | 2:26 p.m.

With Texas Avenue closed down in one direction and the presence of construction workers making a messy parking situation around the Henderson Justice Facility even worse, project managers decided to act.

They authorized about $5,000 in overtime to allow the workers to erect the facility's new parking garage in nine days instead of three weeks.

Though the garage won't be complete and open until May 1, the decision got Texas Avenue reopened, freed up a little more room for parking and gave the residents of the small side street some breathing room.

"The less impact we can have on Texas and the residents in the area, the better," City Architect Mark Hobaica said.

On Tuesday, the City Council unanimously agreed with the decision and authorized the release of the funds, which had already been budgeted into the $32.2 million project's contingency fund.

"We knew it was the right thing to do," Hobaica said.

The justice center expansion will add a 400-stall parking garage and 52,000 square feet of space with to house four courtrooms, the Henderson City Attorney's Office and several other court programs.

Of the 400 parking stalls, Hobaica said, 70 will be reserved for court personnel, while the rest will be open to the public. The parking garage was originally designed to have 250 stalls, but was expanded in order to help ease parking problems in the crowded Water Street District and help the city's redevelopment effort, he said.

"There's so many parking problems we have downtown because of all the construction that's going on, so hopefully, in the big picture, this garage will have a significant impact on the parking situation downtown for the next several years," he said.

The council approved the contract for the Justice Facility expansion and parking garage with Martin-Harris Construction in October 2007. Though several other city projects were put off indefinitely last fall as falling tax revenues put the city in a budget crunch, the Justice Facility was spared because work was already under way.

The expansion project is scheduled to be complete in mid May, about two weeks after the parking garage is expected to open and 30 days behind schedule, Hobaica said.

The delays were caused by the challenges of expanding a building with high security standards, Hobaica said, and he credited Martin-Harris for minimizing them.

"It's an expansion to a building that you can't shut down," Hobaica said. "It's 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. … When you're doing an expansion on a building like that, which you can't shut down, it's a bit tricky."