Courthouse additions

[orulz]

The Buncombe County courthouse is currently undergoing. The first phase is the life safety tower, which will be an eight story addition to the existing building with a small footprint. It will contain things such as elevators, stairs, and restrooms. This will allow them to convert the upper floor space previously used as a jail into office space.

The second phase will be a new five-story courts building along College Street. The building at the corner of College and Valley will remain. The diagonal parking along College will be removed because of safety concerns. Perhaps I have OCD but it always bothered me that the parking on College was asymmetrical (diagonal on one side, parallel on the other.) This won't fix that; the north side will have parallel parking and the south side will now have NO parking.

Davidson Street is also being cut off from College. I don't really consider that to be a big loss. One building, a former funeral home, was already torn down for this expansion. It was a sort of a neat building but I don't consider it to be a huge loss either.

Hopefully the new courts building will look nice. It will be neat to have College Street become more of an enclosed canyon. This has the potential to make the entrance to downtown from the east much more impressive.

The county has one other major project planned: a for the Human Services department on Coxe Avenue.