Wrangell’s courthouse was not selected for Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funding, the city has learned.
Located inside the Public Safety Building, Alaska Court System’s office and courtroom area shares the building with the Department of Motor Vehicles, and Wrangell’s police and emergency services.
The imposing building has for some years been in a delicate state, with extensive repair work to its southern side undertaken in 2008. On its north side, pervasive water damage has ruined much of its siding and underlying framework, and repairing the building’s roof and exterior have topped the borough’s to-do list of capital projects for this fiscal year.
Estimates on the work close in on $550,000, and the city has been looking for outside assistance. Economic development director Carol Rushmore had put in an application with Alaska’s CDBG program, which allocates federal funding primarily for public facilities and activities relating to health and safety. Working with a pool of $2,000,000 this year, the program has a maximum cap of $850,000 per community for any one grant.
One consideration in Wrangell’s applying for the funding is its intended use, with CDBG funding not appropriate for use to aid either the fire or police departments. As such, repairs only to the courthouse area of the building were put forward, costing around $294,000. Of this, Wrangell would need to come up with at least $137,000 as matching funds for the project to go through. The remaining $255,000 needed to fix other affected sections of the building would be covered by budgeted funds.
The application is a competitive process, with points awarded to projects based on need and demographics. CDBG funding regulations require that at least 51 percent of persons benefiting from the project be either low or moderate income persons, as defined by CDBG’s parent department, Housing and Urban Development. Wrangell met that threshold, but other projects were found to be in greater need of support.
“We were just under,” Rushmore said. “We did not make the cut.”
If the courthouse had been picked up for funding, contracting for the entire exterior envelope would have gone out shortly after. Now the city is likely to focus on what it can, repairing high-priority areas first where it can afford.
One area at the top of that list is the courthouse, which had been closed for much of November, December and January due to air quality concerns. ACS, which rents its chambers from the city, had decided to move staff out until further testing could be conducted, in the meantime diverting workload to Ketchikan’s court.
Though leaks in the courtroom offices’ main area have been a perennial issue, things came to a head last September when carpenter ants were found to have colonized a judicial officer’s office walls. The space was opened up by Public Works staff and the room sealed off until further work could be done. Replacing the drywall immediately was at the time thought inadvisable, at least until the full envelope and roof repairs could be completed.
An inspection report pointed out a number of problems with the building’s seals and materials, which had together allowed for a number of leaks to undermine the facility’s integrity. Wanting a third party to inspect air quality as well, ACS eventually closed its office space the week of Thanksgiving, citing safety concerns for its staff.
In that second report, the contractor found most of the Public Safety Building to be safe, with one section of the courtroom offices still above compliance with air quality thresholds. Air scrubbers were set up around the office and halls so the court could reopen in mid-January.
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