Shannon NickinsonSanta Rosa County voters first had the chance to fund construction of a new courthouse in 2002.
That measure failed, but the need to replace the nearly 90-year-old facility in downtown Milton, about 25 miles from Pensacola in the Florida Panhandle, has only grown in the intervening 12 years.
And if it fails again on Nov. 4, the county will continue to pour good money after bad to shore up the existing building, while preparing to take its case for a new courthouse to voters again in 2016.
The price of a replacement goes up about a million a year for every year the project is put off. Now the total stands at about $50 million.
As has the tab the county has paid since 2003 to prop up — literally — parts of the structure. That total is $3.3 million and counting.
It also includes the $800,000 settlement the county had to pay a woman who uses a wheelchair after falling at the courthouse in 2007. Her leg had to be amputated as a result of her injuries.
Santa Rosa Sheriff Wendell Hall says flatly the courthouse is not secure.
Judges, witnesses, family members and prisoners pass within a fingertip’s distance of each other on the way to court in the cramped hallways.
The 2008 addition to house the Circuit Clerk’s office is falling down — as is evidenced by the 4-by-4s maintenance has had to put beneath the collection of trailers where the floor sags and splits. The walls are going soft under the window-unit air conditioners and the building-wide HVAC leaves the main courtroom’s temperature hovering in the 50s in summer.
It’s no way to work. It is no way to guarantee the integrity of important documents and records. It is no way to convey respect for the rule of law.
It most certainly is not prudent use of taxpayer dollars.
Which is why sometimes we have to pony up and pay for public facilities and services we may never personally use.
It’s no one’s idea of a good time, paying taxes. Complaining about taxes is as American as America itself. But services aren’t free.
If we want things, we have to pay for them. And to pay for big things, we pool our money through taxes and pay for things we would never be able to finance otherwise.
That’s part of the deal.
Infrastructure, especially, is expensive and mostly invisible until it breaks.
Our community is aging. From the Milton courthouse to the gas lines and storm-water drains of Pensacola. Fixing it will not be cheap.
There are roads in the Escambia and Santa Rosa county area that I will never drive on, buildings that exist that I may visit once and never again.
And I recognize the need for those roads and buildings to exist for the people who do need them.
So the next time you want to mutter, “what does my tax money go to anyway?” here’s your answer.
It goes toward the social contract we agree to when we wrap ourselves in the flag and holler “’Murica!”
Because those streets are paved for you and me.
Shannon Nickinson is the editor of www.progresspromise.com, a news and analysis website in Pensacola. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
