Matching Linn County courthouse appears to be pipe dream

Linda Langston asked an interesting question at a recent Board of Supervisors meeting: Why can't Linn County build buildings like the courthouse anymore? A building like that, with its columns and stonework, glass and woodwork, wide corridors and echoing stairwells, seems completely out of the question today, as the county looks to build a new juvenile courthouse, a new Options/Community Services building and a renovated or new county office building.

“We are obligated to do something well, and still be costconscious,” Langston said. “Can we even hit a happy medium?” So what did that old courthouse cost? Voters originally approved construction of the May's Island building in 1920 for $600,000, which was then a whopping price for a public building. (A competing bid of $150,000 was rejected by the county as irresponsible. Coincidentally, a sally port add-on to the new juvenile courthouse would cost $180,000 today.) According to an online inflation calculator, $600,000 in 1920 would be $6.4 million today.

Nobody thinks that represents what the courthouse would cost.

In 2004, the building was appraised for insurance purposes. The value was set at $11.6 million, but again, to most people involved with commercial real estate and county government, that price seems ridiculously low.

“To replace something like that would be monstrous,” said Steve Estenson, Linn County's risk manager.

At $300 per square foot, which county facilities manager Garth Fagerbakke thinks would be a reasonable cost, the county courthouse price today would be $22.5 million.

Nope, still too low.

“That seems low,” Fagerbakke said. “I just know we couldn't build that building for $20 million.” Another way to estimate is to compare the county courthouse to similar projects.

The new federal courthouse on Eighth Avenue SE will cost $160 million.

It's going to be 330,000 square feet. That's $480 per square foot. The county courthouse is about 75,000 square feet, or roughly a fourth the federal courthouse's size.

So $40 million. Even at that price, it's hard to imagine the county getting all those huge slabs of cut marble and Ionic columns.

Fagerbakke points out that buildings must now be compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and they must include technology that didn't exist in 1920. Lots of improvements have been made to the county courthouse over the last nine decades, and there are a host of other considerations.

Steve Emerson, an architect and downtown Cedar Rapids developer, said the biggest factor in the new universe of building costs is this: construction costs have outpaced inflation. The cost of labor at every level of every product that goes into a building has multiplied several times in the last 89 years, much faster than inflation.