HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — The current Madison County Courthouse was built in 1967. You can imagine after 56 years, updates are necessary. "This building is an older building," Madison County Commission Chairman Mac McCutcheon shares. "It has some structural concerns. There are some things like ADA compliant restrictions. It has water issues, those kinds of things. So, the building is aging, and it needs some work."
Upgrading something of this magnitude is not all that simple. " As we began to look at this building and look at all of the departments, if you will, that we have in the building, such as the 23rd Judicial Circuit Court in this building, we're at the point of saying, okay, what kind of needs are in this building as far as service needs," McCutcheon shares. "What kind of space do we need? Is there wasted space and the structure and the credibility of the structure of the building?
The Madison County Commission is trying to come up sure ways to make the changes necessary, but McCutcheon says it's a process. "There are some discussions about how we're going to approach this," McCutcheon shares. "Are we going to tear this building down? Are we going to build a new courthouse at this location? Would there be an opportunity to move offsite somewhere? So right now, we're going through all of that process."
Part of that process is discussing design. " They're doing some interviews with contractors, building people, looking at structural design," McCutcheon shares. "We're looking at cost effectiveness. All of these things are going on right now and that's really where we are."
The city of Huntsville is also willing to lend a hand. "I will say the city of Huntsville, they've been very cooperative," McCutcheon explains. "They've sat down and discussed this. The mayor and I have talked about properties around the area that we could utilize, and they're willing to try to help us in that way if we decide that we need to build a new structure and tear this one down or do we want to tear this one down and revealed here."
McCutcheon shares that no matter what, public input will be needed. "What we would like to do and what we will do as we move into these phases and we start looking at the actual numbers and cost, what we will do is bring the public in and have them apart of this process so we can have input from them."