County buildings almost ready

Published 9:00 pm Sunday, December 26, 2004

EVERETT – There is still dust on the floor. Signs on the walls admonish workers against spitting. But work is nearing completion on Snohomish County’s biggest-ever construction project.

Dan Bates / The Herald The new jail, cloaked in glass, sits just east of the new administration building on the Snohomish County government campus.

The $170 million building boom includes a new eight-floor administration building and a 10-story expansion to the county jail. That’s in addition to an underground parking garage that is nearly seven stories deep and already hidden beneath a newly landscaped courtyard.

The $86.5 million jail is now draped on all sides by a “curtain wall.”

The aluminum and glass shroud is designed to make the structure appear less like a maximum-security lockup and more like an office building.

The new jail’s interior spaces are painted, prepped and nearly ready for testing, said Capt. Robin Haas, who is coordinating the project for the county’s corrections department. If all goes to plan, inmates will start occupying cells sometime in May.

“It’s going to take a good two to three months to shake it down,” said Connie Lewis, spokeswoman for the campus redevelopment project.

The county already has set up a tentative schedule for moving government office workers into the new administration building. On most floors, interior walls have been painted. Carpet is scheduled to be installed in the coming weeks. Furniture should begin arriving in late January.

The new administration building features sweeping views from nearly every floor. That’s one benefit of a design that uses a lot of glass to maximize natural light.

Some of the best views are on the north side of the building, where a glass-front stairwell climbs skyward.

There won’t be similar views from the new jail’s cells. Opaque windows will allow natural light inside, but don’t allow people to look out.

That feature was incorporated to eliminate a problem that cropped up after the existing jail was built, Haas said. The owners of nearby buildings complained of graffiti written to send messages to people locked up nearby.

The new 640-bed jail is being built to handle overcrowding at the county’s existing downtown lockup. The 477-bed facility has battled chronic overcrowding for years, with inmates often assigned to sleep on mats in hallways.

Visiting-area telephones await final installation work on the lower floor of the new Snohomish County Jail.

Once the new jail is open, the county will have excess jail space. The state has agreed to pay a minimum of $13,400 a day or about $4.9 million a year to house 200 low-risk probation violators.

That works out to more than 64 percent of the additional salaries and other costs associated with hiring and training staff needed to run the new jail.

Reporter Scott North: 425-339-3431 or north@heraldnet.com.