San Benito County is going to get a new courthouse, and an advisory team has been formed to decide where to put it.
The county is working with the California Administrative Office of the Courts on this decision. The county’s advisory team includes local officials, including both currently presiding judges, and representatives from the City of Hollister, the City of San Juan Bautista and the county.
What I couldn’t figure out from the Free Lance article was who from the Administrative Office of the Courts will be on the team, and what their role will be. That makes me nervous.
This needs to be a local decision, made by people who have not only the best interests of the public and the community at heart, but also a sense of what this place is like. The final decision will be made by the state, but the advisory team needs to give the best-reasoned argument possible.
I’m worried that a bureaucrat from out of town could make persuasive arguments and list a number of good-sounding reasons to make a decision that wouldn’t be right for Hollister and San Benito County.
The two parcels up for consideration are the old Fremont School on Fourth Street and land next to the county jail and juvenile hall on Flynn Road.
According to Superior Court Executive Officer Gil Solorio, there is already a consensus in the community “that the preferred site is downtown.”
Amen.
The court needs to be where the people are. It needs to be reachable by public transportation. It needs to be near lawyers’ offices. It needs to be where people using the court – defendants, plaintiffs, lawyers, judges and jury members – can easily get something to eat without getting in a car.
If I could turn back time, I would put the police department back downtown as well.
These are public services, and they need to be where the public is. If the new courthouse is going to house all the services that the current one does, that’s another set of reasons why it needs to be downtown.
Since a lot of the cases that are heard in our local courts involve the unhappy matters of family law – divorce, custody, neglect, etc. – the courthouse and its location need to be as supportive as possible. Part of making the courthouse user friendly is to keep it in the familiar downtown area rather than in the alien reaches of the weedy field where the police department and jail are housed.
I looked up the selected architect, SmithGroup, based in Detroit but with offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
The diversity and spirit of the projects I saw make me hopeful that they could take the Fremont School site, including, if possible, at least the shell of the school, and turn it into a place that would serve both justice and the people of San Benito County.
Let’s stop being like so many other small-to-sprawl communities and start being like us.
