Seneca County Courthouse

Maybe some people who read this will care about the Seneca County Courthouse. This is a letter to the editor I wrote a few weeks ago that turned into a column that never got sent to any editors, so I shall post it here.

As a longtime Seneca County resident, I have long had an opinion about the Courthouse’s fate — tear it down. The current discussion about saving the building is misguided and far too late.
For five years I went to the Courthouse every day, or almost every day. As I entered, I was confronted by steps that were in such bad shape that, with my clumsiness, I was only one slip away from an embarrassing, and possibly injurious, wipeout in full view of downtown Tiffin.
I also faced an elevator that usually took you to the right floor, but not always.
I faced steep steps inside that gave my legs a solid workout as I went up and down from floor to floor (At least with the steps I knew where I’d end up.). And, that was just to get into any given office or courtroom.
Now, these items could all be repaired during a renovation project. But the point is the access routes into the building were designed with the 1880’s in mind. The elevator that was installed later didn’t help matters, because it didn’t really work and took away whatever beauty the inside corridors were designed to have.
What can’t be repaired is the 1880’s way the rooms in the courthouse are divided. There are many small rooms, with load bearing walls placed all around so it would be very hard to actually create a lot of larger, more modern work spaces.
The county needs two full-sized courtrooms because the population, the number of criminals and the number of possible offenses has grown considerably since the 1880s. There’s almost no way to make that happen in the existing building, and there’s certainly no good way.
Do the preservationists remember Judge Thomas Spellerberg’s basement courtroom, the one downstairs in which the gallery was so small the public had to set outside and watch the proceedings on a closed-circuit television camera? I do.
Do they remember that courtroom barely had enough room for 12 jurors who sat with their backs right up against a curtain that covered a vault door? I do.
Do they remember that even the first floor courtroom used by Judge Steve Shuff, after he took over from Spellerberg, was still too small for use as a courtroom? I do.
Finally, the workers in the courthouse were squeezed into small office spaces. They had to face cramped working conditions, an electrical and wiring system cobbled together long after the building was built and a workplace that had no central air conditioning. The building was simply not built for modern operations — especially electronics and the power, telephone and Internet lines they require.
No renovation could provide a comfortable, efficient and safe workplace. The building simply was not designed to be used in modern ways.
So, even with renovation, I see continued problems in accessing the building, more problems in conducting trials (a courthouse’s main purpose) and even more problems in continuing to perform routine courthouse work in the everyday environment as more people, more paperwork and more electronics get crammed into the same tiny offices.
I have not touched on security, the heat during trials that made the upstairs courtroom almost unbearable during the summer months (it was either live with the heat or strain to hear testimony over the roar of the fans or the window-mounted air conditioner), or the lack of adequate space for juries to conduct their deliberations.
A new building could be designed to meet the modern needs with modern spaces, modern heating and cooling and modern wiring.
In a letter in Thursday’s A-T, the writer lays out the totals for a 2001 projection of the cost of renovating the Courthouse, noting it would be cheaper at those rates to renovate than rebuild. What she misses is twofold: One, the costs have most certainly increased since 2001, and, two, the probable cost overruns in renovation combined with the increase in price means the cost to demolish and rebuild the courthouse is likely similar to the cost of saving the original building.
Absent from the discussion is the commissioners could call for the building to be an elegant new feature of downtown Tiffin. A new courthouse doesn’t have to look like a building in an office park. They could create something that, while housing modern operations, has a stately quality to compliment the other buildings in downtown Tiffin.
Face it: The existing building isn’t all that great, anyway. It is a hodge-podge of styles without its original clock tower. After looking at Wyandot and Hancock’s courthouses, Seneca County’s is, frankly, underwhelming.
The discussion should no longer be about whether we should save the courthouse — the decision was made, and it was the right one. The discussion should be how to build a new building that reflects the community and brings pride back to downtown Tiffin.