AC is latest equipment breakdown at Jackson County Courthouse; repairs may take weeks
Things are about to get uncomfortable at the downtown Jackson County Courthouse.
The AC is on the fritz as jury trials have resumed and a growing number of court and county employees are being called back from their pandemic year of working remotely. Worse, it might not be working again until the first part of June.
Cool temps prevail this week. But a week ago, when it was in the 70s outdoors, the 150 people unlucky enough to have been called for jury duty had a hard time keeping their cool in the sweaty third-floor jury room where, according to Jackson County presiding judge J. Dale Youngs, temps were in the mid-80s,
“I don’t know how they built people back in 1934, but we’re used to air conditioning now,” Youngs said in urging county legislators Monday to approve spending $1.7 million for a temporary fix.
Actually, the Kansas City courthouse did have AC when it opened in 1934. It was one of the few public buildings, other than movie theaters, to have it at the time. The Star thought it noteworthy enough to run a long story, which went into great detail about how the system was specially designed so that each courtroom had “that ultimate touch of modernity, air conditioning with cooling.”
It’s now back to ancient days at 415 E. 12th St. That modern system is all worn out. The original pipes are still in the walls of those courtrooms and county departments that have offices in the art-deco tower former county executive Harry S. Truman commissioned in the midst of the Great Depression.
Some pipes burst a couple of winters ago, damaging courtrooms, flooding the basement and damaging the ancient elevator system that was already on its last legs.
Most all of that damage has been fixed. But while doing routine maintenance on the cooling system in late February, workers discovered “that the system had degraded substantially since previous inspections” and was likely to fail in “numerous locations within the building.”
County legislators Monday unanimously approved spending $1.7 million to make repairs that public works director Brian Gaddie said would at best last three to five years, maybe seven. But ultimately, the whole system will have to be scrapped.
“This is a very costly system to replace,” he said but gave no estimate.
The immediate repairs will take four to eight weeks once work begins, so it could be early June before the cooling system is switched back on, County Administrator Troy Schulte said.
It will be plenty warm by then, Schulte said. The average high temperature in June is about what it was in the jury room last week.
And as for the elevators? Only two of the four public ones are working at the moment.
