Pricey air conditioning option approved to keep criminal justice system working in Kansas City
Jackson County will spend roughly $500,000 a week for at least three weeks next month to cool half of the downtown courthouse so that long-delayed jury trials can proceed.
Employees and visitors to the rest of the building will swelter until repairs are made to the building’s 90-year-old air conditioning system.
None of it is working now. County officials did not bring the system on line this year after finding leaks that would have dampened courtrooms that were only recently repaired from water damage suffered in 2019.
The county legislature recently voted to spend $1.7 million to make repairs to the system that are only estimated to last several years before the county may have to replace the entire climate control system.
Those repairs won’t be done until June 25 at the earliest., which left the county’s public works department with a dilemma.
How do you keep a working courthouse without air conditioning working when it’s broiling outside as a warm Kansas City spring turns into a typically brutally hot Kansas City summer?
The answer is to install temporary cooling units at the foot of the building and pipe the cold air to the upper floors through openings in the windows.
Cooling all 11 floors plus the basement for three weeks was going to cost more than $3 million. So the county administration decided to cut that cost in half by only cooling floors three through eight, which is where the courts do their business.
But even that economy move was met with sticker shock.
“Looking at the numbers, that’s a half million dollars a week,” legislator and budget committee chair Theresa Galvin said at one point during a more than hour-long discussion on whether to spend the money.
Even at that, the county prosecutor’s office on the 10th and 11 floors would have no AC until the end of June, and neither would the county’s administrative offices on the second and first floors or the entrance area on the ground-level.
Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker said her 70-person crew would either tough it out or work remotely. But failing to air condition the courtrooms, she said, would be “devastating” to the criminal justice system.
“The whole system teeters on the need to keep those courtrooms open,” she said.
Baker and Presiding Judge J. Dale Youngs urged reluctant legislators to spend the money to keep the court floors livable if not comfortable during the steamy days to come because of the severe backlog in criminal cases that developed during the pandemic.
“We don’t come to you to ask for things we don’t need,” Youngs said.
While some legislators complained that $1.5 million was a lot of money to spend to cool the building for a few weeks, Youngs raised what he said was the possibility that the county would not have its cooling system back on line at the end of June. It might be July or later, he said.
If a temporary system was not in place, he said, trials could not go on. People accused of crimes would languish in jail and victims would have to wait even longer for justice.
That, he said, was unacceptable.
The legislature approved the project 9-0, with the money coming out of a contingency fund, but federal coronavirus CARES Act funds might ultimately pick up the tab .
The temporary cooling equipment won’t be operational until the first week of June, public works director Brian Gaddiie said as legislators Jalen Anderson and Tony Miller fanned themselves with papers from their desks.
What about until then? their colleague Jeanie Lauer asked.
“May can be pretty brutal,” she said.
Fans and portable air conditioning units are on the way, county administrator Troy Schulte said. But Gaddie noted that the courthouse’s electrical system is ancient, too.
One too many plugs in the sockets and parts of that internal grid could go down, too.
This story was originally published May 3, 2021 at 1:31 PM.
