Partly cloudy skies early followed by scattered thunderstorms overnight. Low 76F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%..
Partly cloudy skies early followed by scattered thunderstorms overnight. Low 76F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%.
Construction screws work on installing flooring Aug. 12 at the new emergency operations center in Angleton. The $8.5 million project will be the first new building to be completed as part of the county’s courthouse campus expansion.
Brazoria County Judge Matt Sebesta and Brazoria County Office of Emergency Management staff tour the new emergency operations center Aug. 12 in Angleton. The center will be substantially complete next month.
Construction screws work on installing flooring Aug. 12 at the new emergency operations center in Angleton. The $8.5 million project will be the first new building to be completed as part of the county’s courthouse campus expansion.
Brazoria County Judge Matt Sebesta and Brazoria County Office of Emergency Management staff tour the new emergency operations center Aug. 12 in Angleton. The center will be substantially complete next month.
Brazoria County is just weeks away from having a completed Emergency Operations Center, which is part of the overall $171 million expansion and improvement project to grow the justice center.
The EOC’s expected building completion date is September, with a few additional items following by the end of the year, Brazoria County Judge Matt Sebesta said.
“The contractor will be substantially complete the third week in September. They will just be short an interior curtain wall that will not be delivered until early October, and the generator for the building won’t be here until sometime in November,” he said. “Once those two items are in, it will be fully complete, and we will move our emergency management folks into the building.”
The 15,500-square-foot building will be across Locust Street from the front of the Brazoria County Courthouse and across West Life Oak Street from the West Annex. It will have more displays for the emergency management team to monitor events, breakout rooms for meetings and other amenities to help track and respond to events.
“With the EOC looking at completion at the end of September, they’re doing the last little bit on it,” Assistant County Engineer Karen McKinnon said. “They’re testing the mechanical equipment, putting up security and other IT things, and testing it right now. This is the fun one because it’s almost done.”
The EOC accounts for $8.17 million of the $171 million expansion project, and a state grant is covering most of the emergency center’s cost.
An additional $61 million of the project will go toward an administration building at Locust and East Live Oak streets, the shell of which is beginning to take shape, Sebesta said. It is scheduled for completion late next year.
“We then have the administrative building that you can see across the street; they are hanging steel and pouring the floor decking,” he said. “They should have that complete the third week of September.”
The construction crew from SpawGlass, a Houston commercial and civil construction company, is expected to begin fireproofing and framing the first floor soon, Sebesta said.
“(For) the admin building, we have poured the second level deck and will be pouring level three deck later this week pending weather,” McKinnon said. “They are fireproofing and doing ductwork on level one.”
Another part of the project includes renovations to the 1940s-era courthouse and its 1976 addition and the West Annex.
“Next we will bid out the justice center, which is the expansion of the 1976 building,” McKinnon said. “We should get bids back on it on Monday and will go to court in October to be awarded. You won’t see the construction start until the beginning of the year.”
Once a department moves to its new quarters, be it the emergency center or administration building, renovation of the existing courthouse facility will take place, Sebesta said.
“We have another three years or so of work before everything will be complete,” he said. “We have a very good contractor and are mending the project well. We’ve had a few hiccups here and there with delivery with different companies, like the generator on the EOC and the curtain wall.”
Planning for the expansion started several years ago as the county saw the need to prepare for rapid population growth.
The county has 372,000 people and is projected to have 750,000 by 2050, which will require creating up to seven more district courts by that time, Sebesta said. Per a study done three years ago, the county is a few district courts short and three years behind on trials, Sebesta said.
“They’re good (projects) because the county is growing and the whole reason for the admin building is because of the growth the county is seeing and the courts we need to add,” McKinnon said.
The expansion project also will allow some departments housed in rented space to return to the courthouse campus, Precinct 3 County Commissioner Stacy Adams said.
Raven Wuebker is a reporter for The Facts. Contact her at 979-237-0152.
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