At tonight’s meeting, the Athens-Clarke County Commission will vote on a list of potential sites for their new courthouse.
The SPLOST project has two parts — building a new primary courthouse and renovating the existing structure on North Thomas Street to hold other government facilities.
The Site Selection Committee proposed five sites to the commission. Results from a public survey revealed downtown’s federally-owned 355 East Hancock Avenue as the most popular location, with the current site of B&B Theaters on the East Side garnering the most disapproval.
The other downtown candidate site currently holds two empty parking lots off of North Jackson Street. District 6’s Jesse Houle said they favored the walkability that a downtown courthouse would offer. They expressed an interest in moving forward with just those two sites to reduce the costs associated with exploring several properties.
“Look at a Google Earth image of our downtown, it’s that north part of downtown that’s just plagued by these treeless surface parking lots,” Houle said. “They’re far from the highest and best use of any property, so converting those, to me, makes a whole lot of sense if we can’t access the federal property.”
The sites approved by the commission tonight will be further analyzed over the next two months, and city staffers will present a top preferred site to the group on November 7.
