HUNTSVILLE — State and federal funds have paid for close to $300,000 worth of improvements within the past year for the 75-year-old Madison County Courthouse. But the amount is small compared with the total cost of rehabilitating the aging building.
Clements Associates Architecture of North Little Rock in 2012 estimated that a complete restoration of the courthouse would cost about $3.6 million.
“Counties do not have the revenue to keep up with the maintenance,” County Judge Frank Weaver said of the courthouse. “It’s going to start deteriorating faster than we can keep up with it if we don’t” do something to stop it.
The Madison County Quorum Court will make a final decision during its meeting at 6 p.m. Monday on whether to ask voters in November to approve a 1 percentage-point increase in county sales tax. The change would bump the total sales tax collected by the county from 2 percent to 3 percent, with a portion of the proceeds going to courthouse restoration.
If voters approve the new tax, the combined county and state sales tax would be 9.5 percent; it would be 11.5 percent within Huntsville, which has an additional 2 percent sales tax.
Voters rejected a similar proposal in 2013.
County Clerk Faron Ledbetter said he anticipates that a 1 percent county sales tax would generate $1 million in additional revenue for the county. How the money would be distributed is up for discussion, but the current plan is to allocate $250,000 for the courthouse.
So far, grants have been a primary means of rehabilitating the courthouse, which has a basement and three floors, Weaver said.
Heavy rains in 2011 flooded the courthouse basement, which had housed the sheriff’s office, Weaver said.
The county was awarded $65,114 in July 2013 from the state’s Historic Preservation Program toward a $70,000 project to waterproof the outside of the basement and install French drains on the north, east and west sides of the building, Weaver said.
A federal disaster declaration from the Federal Emergency Management Agency provided the county with $21,387.18 toward a project totaling $55,418.66 to restore the inside of the basement, Weaver said. The rest of the money came from insurance, the county general budget and the state General Improvement Fund grant program.
The interior work included repairing and repainting walls and the floor, and replacing damaged ceiling tiles, Weaver said.
Madison County prosecutor Joel Cape; his assistant, Shailee Ledbetter; and Adult Probation Officer Jill McCallie now have offices in the basement. They moved out of their offices in another aging county building on the courthouse property.
“It’s convenient because the courtroom is upstairs,” Shailee Ledbetter said.
But walls and windows on the first, second and third floors show evidence of the ongoing issues with water leaks, including in Assessor Will Jones’ first-floor office. When Jones took office in 2009, he noticed some cracking above a window in his office. He sealed the cracks with caulk. The repair on a horizontal crack above his window lasted about two years, he said.
The crack now stretches across the top of the window and is an inch wide.
“I gave up on it,” because of the ongoing water leaks into the walls, Jones said.
A $185,696 grant awarded this month by the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program will allow the county to replace the roof and repair a parapet wall on the northwest corner of the building that supports the roof, Weaver said. The grant also includes money to replace a failing air-conditioning unit that cools the second-story courtroom.
“We’ve tried to stop the water infiltration before we start working on the inside,” Weaver said. “We’ve done that with the basement. Now we’ve got to stop it coming through the roof.”
Fully stopping water infiltration, though, will require repairing the building’s brick and mortar, and leaky areas around windows, Weaver said.
Those repairs would cost another roughly $275,000, Faron Ledbetter said.
That doesn’t include other major projects, such as replacing aging water and sewer pipes that have rusted and corroded, upgrading the electrical system to accommodate technology devices, providing central heat and air throughout the courthouse, adding an elevator, and making the building accessible to people with disabilities, Weaver said.
The county general operating budget of $2.5 million for 2014 can’t support those projects, he said. Without additional funding, Weaver said, the county will have to continue to rely on grants to make improvements one phase at a time.
“It’s a landmark,” Weaver said of the courthouse. “It’s part of the identity for Madison County.”