Wednesday, June 18, 2003

Doing Justice to cheap seats, hard floors

By CAL BEVERLY
editor@thecitizennews.com

I've seen it referred to as the Taj Mahal. I've read about its opening earlier this year to accommodate several county offices. But until Monday I had not felt the pain of the new $32 million Fayette County Justice Center.

Yep, real pain. More about that in a minute.

The summons was "to lay aside all business" and show up at 8:30 a.m. Monday to serve in a pool of prospective jurors. Turns out it was for some civil cases in Fayette State Court, the "junior" court in the new courthouse.

My first experience with the newest government monument was the interesting maze of arrowed driveways leading to the palatial building off Jimmie Mayfield Boulevard in Fayetteville. Parking abounds, acres of asphalt.

Inside, I first mistook the uniforms and metal-detecting machines that greet all entering taxpayers as a mistaken trip to the Atlanta Airport and antiterrorist headquarters, but, no, I was still in Fayette County, Toto. (You remember taxpayers, don't you: those under-appreciated souls who are paying on the installment plan for this giant monument to caution first and justice later?)

There were at least four deputies guarding the entrance to the mahogany-railinged hall, while three or four more stood watch over us waiting jurors-to-be upstairs. I admit: We were a dangerous-looking bunch. Some even wore shorts.

Just like at the airport, we had to dump our pocket items and send parcels through the detectors. I asked, "You won't allow this through?" The pocket Swiss Army gizmo held one wicked one-and-one-half-inch blade, so rather than face its confiscation as a threat to national security, I walked it back to my vehicle and returned to pass through without setting off alarms.

Where to? "Just follow those people," the deputy in charge of front entrance paperwork directed vaguely.

OK, up the fine stairway to a second-floor "jury assembly room." Around me were acres of glassed-off offices, sometimes two glass (security?) walls deep before you saw public servants behind their desks, well separated from the stray public who might be seeking them.

Then into the warm and getting-warmer "assembly" area, rows of emergency-room seats with backs that reclined precipitously. And, by the way, the brand-new, state-of-the-art, public-money-funded air conditioning system, less than a half-year old, was on the fritz. No cool air for an entire section of the brand-new justice center. Workers had been trying without success over the weekend to start the cool in time for Monday morning court. Officials were prepared to move us all to "a cooler part of the building."

Just as an aside: Why does everybody in the new justice center get great seats except John Q. Public who must show up for jury duty under penalty of law to cool (or warm) his heels for possibly hours on end in a featureless room with seat backs that seem perilously close to dumping him onto his wallet? It's like everywhere else that makes you wait to pay dearly for their services: Seating for the customers the ones who pay the bills seems to be a last-minute, oops!-kind of afterthought. Seems to me, the customer, the taxpaying John Q. Public, ought to be getting the best seats in the house.

Maybe a few less mahogany rails and a few more substantial seats would have been a clever idea for our eagle-eyed county commission, the board that borrowed the money and ramrodded this project to completion.

After an hour's wait, attorneys for the two cases left on the calendar were otherwise engaged in other courts. So the jury pool was released until later in the week. It's amazing how one absent attorney can lock down the productive output of multiple dozens of taxpayers for untold hours every court term. But courts run at attorneys' convenience, not at anybody else's.

Like a kid in a public candy store, I wandered the gleaming halls of this epicenter of public service. On the first floor, I made a turn and that's where the pain began.

A bank of elevators and stairs dominates the center of the building, but the stairwells are not walled off, unlike everything else in the justice center. There is a raised curb, not a wall, beneath the stairwells, presumably as a decorative feature and a kind of faux-barrier to people wandering through to prevent them from striking their heads on descending stairways.

Unfortunately, the only barrier the curb really presents is to safely walking the hallways. Chalk it up to advancing age, my innate clumsiness, or a stupid design feature: Whatever it was, my right foot caught the unseen inside curb in the turn and your portly editor went a-sprawling.

Those gleaming stone floors are awfully unforgiving of portly editors' knees. My cellphone and its battery parted company and went skittering their separate ways near the entrance to the Clerk of Superior Court's office.

Thank you, unknown lady public servant, who was concerned for my well-being and assisted me to a nearby bench (still uncomfortable, but at that moment down a few notches on my list of inconveniences).

So blame this column on absent attorneys, bad chairs, poor design and hard floors. But memo to county commission: Get some workers to round off those curbs to prevent absolutely foreseeable negligence lawsuits heading your way. Which the taxpayers, not the commissioners, will be paying for.

Is justice worth the inconvenience and the occasional pain? Without a second thought: Yes.

But, is the Justice Center worth the $32 million we are paying for it? The jury's still out on that one.