ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
Those who have driven between Fourth Street and Sixth Street on Washington Avenue in Liberal recently have likely seen a new look to one of the buildings in that neighborhood.
Work began in October 2024 and was completed in April on a renovation project for the Seward County Courthouse, and County Contract Consultant Neal Coffey, who headed up the project, said much in the way of history was uncovered, as the looks of the building were changed.
One of those pieces of history was the names of former Seward County Sheriff Howard Smith and his wife, Edna, carved into concrete, and Coffey said further work, including wallpaper removal, revealed the current home of the Court Services offices in the back of the courthouse used to be the living quarters for the sheriff.
A familiar sight in front of the courthouse, the fish pond, was removed during the renovation, and Coffey said workers actually discovered it was a small part of a huge pond.
“When we started taking that out, we realized they hadn’t taken that old pond out,” he said. “If we had just gone in there and put dirt in there with all the concrete pond below there, it would’ve just become a swamp over time.”
Instead, Coffey said workers had to dig this out to bring the parking lot where the pond used to be. He said, however, though many did not know about the bigger pond, he did have memories from his childhood of that pond.
Liberal’s OC Quality Custom Homes was the winning bidder on the project, and Coffey said the first step in renovation came to the courthouse’s landscape.
“We went in and pulled out all of those trees in front of the courthouse and started adjusting the grade on the front of the courthouse so we could completely rebuild that front parking lot, particularly the east side, with a focus on making that fully ADA-compliant from a handicap perspective,” he said.
Additional handicap parking and ramps were put in as the process of renovating the front of the courthouse continued.
“We took out all the steps going into the front entry of the courthouse so the wheelchairs could easily come and go,” Coffey said.
Before the project started, the courthouse’s north entrance came with two sets of doors.
“You came through the main doors, and before you got into the vestibule, there was another set of doors, which really complicated things for people in wheelchairs,” Coffey said.
These were taken out, and that space was completely remodeled, along with hallways leading to the east side of the courthouse and one leading to the south end of the building where offices for Seward County Emergency Management and Cimarron Basin Community Corrections can be found.
“We didn’t do any of the offices in that area, but we did the hallways,” Coffey said. “We did all the offices in the district court clerk’s area, including that reception area where the four clerks sit.”
One of the biggest remodels, though, took place around the biggest courtroom in the building – Courtroom C.
“We did not completely remodel Courtroom C, but we did a lot of work in there,” Coffey said. “Coming off of Courtroom C and going down into the judges’ chambers where the chief justice sits, we completely remodeled all of that, including the law library and that area, with the design of adding some additional security to protect the judge whenever he’s in chambers. “
A pathway from Courtroom C by the judges chambers was originally considered an exit, so in order to protect judges, the pathway could long be used as an exit.
“We had to put an additional door in Courtroom C,” Coffey said. “When you go in Courtroom C now, in the front end, which is on the east end on the south side, there’s a new door cut into that. That’s the secondary exit out of that room in the event of an emergency.”
Coffey said workers had to consider the possibility of a prisoner making a break as they continued in this part of the courthouse.
“In normal thought processes, we don’t think about that kind of stuff,” he said. “What we had to do is we had to put some alarms on it. If it gets opened for any reason, an alarm goes off, and officers can respond to that. Overall, the project went very well. It ended well ahead of schedule. OC did a good job on that. The parking lot turned out very nice.”
As the process continued, change orders were needed, and Coffey said this is typical as things are encountered during a remodel. He pointed to the pond as a perfect example.
“Whenever you encounter that, you have to change the process, change the project and get those additional funds ordered,” he said. “From an order of magnitude perspective, there really were not all that many.”
Coffey said the project’s architectural firm, GMCN Architects of Garden City did a good job of drawing up the project, and OC Quality Homes did a great job of executing it.
“There were just a few changes as we went through,” he said.
Coffey said as offices and hallways were being painted, one part of the building overlooked was doorframes.
“When we got all that other looking so nice and the doorframe was not looking so nice, we had to do a change order to go back in and redo the doorframes,” he said.
One problem crews ran into, though, was figuring out where to stop with the remodeling process.
“Once we got the doorframes done, some of the doors were absolute junk,” he said. “We had to come back and ask for some additional money to do the doors.”
Another problem came with trying to put square items into an unlevel floor.
“The floors are not level,” Coffey said. “With the new doors, we had to redo everything so we could get the doors to fit in the unlevel floor and make it look right.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, access to the courthouse was limited, as it was during the recent renovation. However, Coffey said crews worked closely with District Judge Clint Petersen and District Court Clerk Donna Odneal and other staff to reroute traffic in the building.
“As we were doing hallways and offices, we did not want the public to have to walk through those construction zones,” Coffey said. “During those periods of time, the staff of the courthouse worked with us to redirect traffic, put up signage, bring people in doors they normally would’ve never come in, leave doors unlocked with signage directing traffic that way so we could move people in and out. The staff worked with us very well to move traffic around different ways at different times.”
In addition to Courtroom C, the Seward County Courthouse has Courtrooms A, B and D, and with the possibility of any of those courtrooms being in session and any given time, noise sensitivity too was a problem that had to be addressed throughout the renovation.
“One of the reasons they’re so sensitive to noise is their recording equipment that’s used to take the records of what’s happening in the courtroom,” Coffey said. “If it starts picking up that background noise, it can cover the voice traffic. There were a lot of times we would be working, and we would have to stop those activities, or at the beginning of the day, we would review our activities with the district court personnel.”
Coffey said based on where courthouse staff was going to be and what crews had planned, activities were adjusted to meet everyone’s schedules.
“We would meet weekly and do a one-week and a two-week look ahead so we would have some idea of what the court schedules are relative to our project schedule and try to merge those up to get the process flowing as freely as possible,” he said. “You just can’t anticipate the criminal activity in the county and when it’s going to happen. When stuff like that would come in, obviously, it would impact on our schedule.”
Naturally, work crews would have to give court staff the priority to proceed with their work.
“Without that willingness and to work with us through the process, without the court clerk and her staff, this wouldn’t have been successful, but they were very good to us, as were the judges to help us understand where we could be or to tolerate a little bit of noise if they knew it had to end to it,” Coffey said. “They worked with us very well, but it was a huge impact on that whole process.”
Coffey said the renovation made a dramatic impact on the appearance and functionality, particularly with the building’s doors and some of the lighting.
“If you look at the front area, we’ve particularly changed massively how that presents and how that looks,” he said. “We think it’s a good look. We did have one issue when we were working on that front side.”
War monuments in the front of the building honoring veterans from the Korean War and Vietnam War, as well as other conflicts, were handled with extreme care.
“We wanted to make certain where we put them in the final product, the traffic would flow around them, and they would be given the honor they deserve from a presentation standpoint,” Coffey said. “Those things are huge. That turned out nice, and it’s a significant difference in how that looks.”
Much of the courthouse’s lighting was changed, and Coffey said a huge impact was particularly seen behind Odneal’s office.
“There were some electric file storage units,” Coffey said. “We took those out. Those were huge devices, and when we took those out, we refinished that entire room and made a conference room out of that. The other portion of that became the break room for the personnel of district court. You walk in there today, and it’s a completely different setup. It looks like it belongs.”
As the courthouse transitions to its new look, so too does its record keeping system into an electronic method, and Coffey said a tremendous amount of district court’s paper records were scanned in electronically to preserve them during the renovation.
“Any boxes of records we had to move, we had to be supervised as we went through that so they stayed in custody,” he said. “The process went very well because of the coordinated efforts between OC and Donna Odneal and her staff.”
The renovation project was paid for out of money the county received from the federal American Rescue Plan Act, and Coffey said the project likely would have never happened without that funding.
“The project ended in excess of a little more than $1 million,” he said.
Something Coffey said needs to be looked at in the future is the need and the demand for more security for judges.
“As you look at the things that happen across the country in courts with prisoners attacking judges, people in the courts carrying weapons, shooting, we’re going to have to look at adding some of those layers of security over here,” he said.
Coffey said a total security upgrade could have been part of the renovation, but there was not enough money to do that.
“It was easily in excess of $1 million, probably approaching 10 times that if you got everything you wanted to do,” he said.
So, Coffey said, giving the courts the security they need will have to be looked at in the long term of the courthouse.
“At some point, we need to look at those things,” he said. “A judge can complete a case, walk out into the hallway and come face to face with the family of the person they just convicted and sentenced.”
