Fayette County officials are still looking for a place to put Superior Court Judge-elect Chris Edwards.

Edwards hopes to fulfill his campaign promise of becoming the first judge in the Griffin Judicial Circuit to open a permanent office in Fayette County, but finding space for an office has proved difficult.

County administrator Billy Beckett said this week he is looking at various ways to find office space in the Fayette County Administrative Complex on Stonewall Avenue, though the first choice was to find space in the county judicial complex.

Beckett last week gave county commissioners two alternatives for building an office for Edwards, along with three storage vaults for courthouse records, in the existing courthouse, but commissioners balked at the cost and asked Beckett to keep looking.

The first alternative would cost $260,000, including $58,500 for a 450-sq. ft. office for Edwards, $52,000 each for two 400-sq. ft. vaults, and $44,900 for a 430-sq. ft. vault, plus related costs.

Scheme B would provide 850 square feet for Edwards and an assistant at $110,500, plus three 800-sq. ft. vaults at $104,000 each.

Commissioner Herb Frady suggested building one vault at the courthouse and housing Edwards at the county administrative complex.

He also wondered whether new data storage techniques might eventually eliminate the need for some of the vault space.

But Beckett said those techniques are developing slowly, and in any case laws require that hard copies of court records be kept for several years, with scanned data required after that.

Spending that much money for storage and office space at the courthouse is especially unpalatable to commissioners because the space would soon be obsolete. They are in the process of planning for a new judicial complex to be built in a few years.