AUGUSTA-RICHMOND COUNTY Judicial Center

The four-story, concrete-framed Judicial Center, located in the southern fringe of downtown Augusta, includes eight courtrooms, nine hearing rooms, a grand jury room, judge’s chambers, and offices for the DA, Solicitor General, and Clerks of the Courts. The facility serves the Superior, State, Magistrate and Probate Courts.

Turner & Townsend Heery provided construction management agency services for the exterior renovations to the Augusta-Richmond County Judicial Center encompassing installation of new energy-efficient exterior windows, replacement of sealants in exterior stone cladding joints and replacement of leaky roof assemblies. According to Augusta-Richmond County’s 2007 annual report, the government expects the new double-pane, spectrally-selective windows to reduce utility bills by enough to cover the cost of the entire project, including professional fees, within 10 years.

Turner & Townsend Heery’s involvement in Augusta-Richmond County’s Capital Improvement Program (CIP) began in January 2004.  In March 2005, when Turner & Townsend Heery was assigning budgets to a number of projects, Turner & Townsend Heery’s cost estimators believed that the programmed size for the judicial building needed to be revisited.  Turner & Townsend Heery was asked to review the Project Definition Report which was prepared by the architect and included a 15-year projection of staff and caseloads. The projections showed growth in the levels of staff from 296 in 2003 to 561 in 2018 (almost double), which would require the design of a 300,000 SF facility to accommodate the projected needs. 

Turner & Townsend Heery compared these figures to the historic population studies provided by the U.S. Census Bureau and determined that the architect showed exponential growth in staff while the U.S. Census Bureau showed a flat line growth in population.  Turner & Townsend Heery saw other anomalies in the report as well and decided to utilize its in-house resources to perform a review of the space program produced by the architects.  The information contained within the Project Definition document, represented the basis from which the proposed Judicial Center size