BROOKINGS — A project to replace the roof at the courthouse moved ahead a step following discussions at Tuesday morning’s Brookings County Commission meeting.

Commissioners ultimately settled, in a 5-0 vote, on an option that will replace the roof and includes work on roof drains in an effort to reduce the pooling of water. The preliminary budget analysis, which was provided by DesignArc during its presentation, was pegged at $351,937.50. That total includes roof replacement, roof drain work and development costs.

“It’s not absolutely imperative that you do this, but it is beneficial because it will improve the ability for the courthouse to withstand events and, eventually, water always wins, of course,” DesignArc Project Manager Matthew Weiss said of the roof drains. “That has happened to you recently in the past year or two where, in a particular spot, you’ve had leakage through one of these pool areas, and we’d like to take care of that if we can.” 

Prior to the vote, commissioners also heard about two other projection options: Courthouse cupola tuckpointing, at an additional cost estimate of $16,800, and cupola window rehabilitation with an estimated price tag of $21,800. Including adjusted development costs, this would have raised the overall preliminary budget analysis to $418,843.50. 

“From street side, from eye level, there’s no way that you can tell, but your cupola structure — the stone masonry above the roof — it’s showing pretty severe issues with the mortar tuckpointing between the stone slabs,” Weiss said. “We would suggest that at this time or very soon, you consider doing a tuckpointing of the cupola itself.”

He noted that, due to its height and somewhat difficulty in getting to, it would be a bit more expensive to do the tuckpointing, hence the $16,800 estimate. He added that, at the current time, mason work is also very expensive due to a labor shortage in Brookings County.

Weiss then switched his focus to the cupola’s windows, where he had somewhat better news. 

“The four large windows — the historic wood windows — there are a couple of locations which it might be of benefit for you to do some window rehab work,” he said. “I don’t suggest at this time that you try to replace the windows. They’re rather big openings, and only little parts of the wood framing and the sash work is going bad right now. All the glass panes are intact.” 

In commissioner discussion that followed the presentation, the focus included the financial impact of doing all of the work at once versus separating it out, bid timing, contractor availability — or lack thereof — the funding source for the work and whether or not the project could yet be done this fiscal year, or would have to wait until the next fiscal year.

“Normally when you have a project like this on a roof and we have the additions — normally you would do those additions because there’s a benefit that it might be less expensive or something like that, but it doesn’t seem like these additions would be less expensive to do them,” Commissioner Ryan Krogman observed. “So I’m inclined to just stay with the roof and then do the other ones down the road. … It seems to me that, if we add these two on, it’s going to cost us more and could delay the project.”

On top of that, the courthouse is on the National Register of Historic Places, meaning any proposed work on the structure needs to be reviewed by the South Dakota Historic Preservation Office. It’s expected that DesignArc will submit those documents as the effort moves along, and no issues are being foreseen.

Finally, the roof replacement project is a process, not a bases-loaded-grand-slam-and-it’s-done kind of thing. The next step is to enter the bidding phase and go from there.

— Contact Mondell Keck at mkeck@brookingsregister.com.