Fresno County’s getting a new $750 million courthouse. When it’s coming and what to expect

Fresno is in line to get a new county courthouse downtown – an investment that could cost as much as $750 million for the state of California to replace one that was built in 1966.

The current Fresno County Courthouse on Van Ness Avenue between Fresno and Tulare streets has been deemed seismically risky.

Along with two other satellite court facilities (one on Tuolumne and M streets, the other in the North Annex of the county jail) the building is no longer well-suited to serve the public, as courts become busier with each passing year.

“It’s very exciting for Fresno, I think,” said Justice Brad Hill, presiding justice of the state’s 5th District Court of Appeal and chair of the Judicial Council of California’s Court Facilities Advisory Committee. “For a criminal courthouse, proximity to downtown is important.”

Just as the wheels of justice sometime grind slowly, however, it’s going to be years before a new building becomes a reality – perhaps not until 2031.

The Judicial Council’s broad description of the project outlines a vision of a 413,000-square-foot courthouse with 36 courtrooms that is now in the planning stages. More than $21 million has been allocated in the state’s 2022-23 budget to acquire about 2.1 acres needed, but no specific site has been determined.

“The new courthouse project will replace and consolidate the court’s operations and courtrooms currently in the county-owned Fresno County Courthouse and North Annex Jail and in the leased M Street Courthouse,” a project description from the Judicial Council states. “As the superior court continues to have a need for new judgeships, the project will also provide some space for future growth.”

“We’re just starting the process,” Hill told The Fresno Bee on Friday. “It is anticipated that acquisition will be a process that takes about 18 months to work through, but hopefully sooner.”

“If they have the plot of land within two years, I hope that if everything goes well, the process of going from architectural drawings to working plans to construction would be a five-year process,” he added, “so it’s possible it could be completed by 2029.”

A rising price tag

What was forecast in 2019 to cost about $483.1 million is now projected to have a price tag of almost $750 million by the time it’s finished.

“Construction costs have really gone up,” Hill acknowledged. “I hope that when we get through (property) acquisition, we may see a more normal construction market.”

Still, he added, the state has been working to develop ways to build courthouses more economically. “Courthouses used to have a lot of marble and a lot of wood,” Hills said. “Now you won’t find any marble, and there’s almost no wood” in modern courthouses – a stark contrast to a bygone era when a county’s courthouse was a grand edifice.

Practicality, security and safety – not grandeur – are the targets for new courthouse construction in the state.

“We’ve spent a long time coming up with standardized designs” for courthouses, Hill said. “Years ago, when they’d build a new courthouse, they would go to each court, meet with the judges, and ask, ‘What do you want your courtroom to look like?’ And architects would be paid exorbitant sums to design these courthouses.”

Now, there are several templates from which courts and their judges can choose, “and you can’t design your own courtroom anymore,” Hill said. “We have standard designs where all the courtrooms and all the floors will look the same. … We want to make sure it looks nice, but not something that is, shall we say, ‘grand.’”

A long time coming

The first Fresno County Courthouse in downtown Fresno was a neoclassical structure with a dome and cupola, built in 1875 at a cost of $56,000. It was a prominent symbol of the city and was expanded several times over the next 90 years until it was determined to be unsafe in the event of an earthquake.

To the dismay of fans of the classic, old courthouse, the structure was torn down in 1966 and replaced by the current courthouse, a nine-floor (including two basement floors) building known for its concrete facade – alternately described by fans as a “honeycomb” or derided by critics as a “cheese-grater.” The courthouse was completed in 1966 at a cost of about $6.5 million.

But Fresno County’s courts have outgrown the main courthouse and over the years have expanded into other sites, including civil and family law cases at the B.F. Sisk Courthouse (formerly the federal building) and traffic and other cases at a facility on M Street. There are also two courtrooms in the basement of the North Jail Annex in which domestic violence and some other criminal cases are heard.

Hill said the prospect of either building a new courthouse in downtown Fresno or undertaking a massive renovation of the existing courthouse has been bouncing around since the mid-2010s. Ultimately, a renovation was considered to be cost-prohibitive, and a temporary site would also need to have been found for courtrooms, judges and court offices during the course of a renovation.

Highest category of need

In a Judicial Council evaluation of more than 200 court buildings throughout the state, Fresno’s courthouse ranked among the most deficient in several critical categories and was deemed among the highest priorities for replacement in 2019.

“The Fresno County Courthouse is the superior court’s oldest and largest facility and is substantially out of compliance with regulatory safety, seismic, accessibility codes and Judicial Council space standards,” the judicial council reported.

The council cited “significant functional issues” including an undersized lobby and space for security screening, too few elevators for the number of daily courthouse visitors, an undersized jury assembly room, lack of holding facilities for inmates awaiting court appearances, no secure areas for attorneys to meet with their clients, and no segregated circulation routes for in-custody defendants to be brought to court separate from the public, judges and court staff.

The new courthouse is intended to bring under one roof the courtrooms in the main courthouse, the jail annex and the M Street facility, and remedy all of those deficiencies.

That is part of what is contributing to a growing price tag, Hill said. “It’s one thing to build a Class-A office building, where you don’t have security considerations like prisoner movement and secure cells,” he said. “Those are things that take a lot of time to design.”

“We’re building these buildings to last. A Class-A office building has to be retrofitted and redone often,” Hill added. “We’re building these, on the outside and on the inside, to be around for decades and decades. That’s part of the reason why the costs are so high. We don’t want to have to do this again” for many years.