Pulaski County will have to make several upgrades to its courthouse, following complaints about working conditions in the building. County officials have already been busy making improvements since the county was sued last December for a lack of ADA compliance. Now, the Indiana Occupational Safety and Health Administration has gotten a complaint about seven specific issues in the courthouse.
County Maintenance Supervisor Jeff Johnston told the county commissioners Monday that a couple of them are easy to fix. “It says, number one, a handrail’s loose in the basement,” he explained. “The handrail is actually secured to the wall. It’s the wall itself that’s moving, I’d say, like maybe less than a quarter of an inch, it’s moving. We can have that fixed today.” Pinch points were noted in the pipework of the newly-remodeled bathrooms. Johnston said those can easily be covered with foam.
However, some of the recommended upgrades will be a bit more challenging, such as repairing a falling ceiling in the courtroom. “We know that we can’t repair the inside of the room before we repair the outside [of the courthouse] because we’ll just be throwing money away,” Johnston said. “It’s already been approved by you guys and the council to go ahead with the outside repairs, and once those repairs are done, we can focus on the inside of the building.”
The complaint also notes that electrical plugs are overloaded. For now, Johnston said the system is capable of running the necessary office equipment, but not necessarily other things like space heaters. Johnston said an electrical overhaul done a couple years ago replaced several items but didn’t add much new capacity. “In order to make this building’s electrical supply adequate, you’re going to have to add a lot, but it goes deeper than that,” he explained. “The way that the offices are set up, you’ll have to figure a way to remap the offices so that the office space is used correctly or more efficiently, I don’t know what the term would be. And then, once you’ve figured out what the mapping is of the offices, then you figure out where the electricity’s going to run.”
There are also a few complaints that Johnston didn’t believe are actually problems, such as mold in the assessor’s office. “We’ve had the state health department come in twice, over a year apart from each visit, and do air quality tests, and they found no evidence of mold in that office,” he said. “So I guess I don’t know why that was listed on here. Everybody knows that we’ve done that. And we could disassemble the walls in that room, and I still don’t think we would find any. If there’s mold in the office, the air quality test would’ve shown it.”
The complaint also says there are bald electrical wires in the courthouse. Johnston said he hasn’t seen any, but he planned to do a room-by-room examination of the building Monday. Similarly, the report also noted wire hanging out of a pull box in the maintenance room. Johnston said that the only box that was uncovered contained telephone lines, not electrical wiring, but he has since covered it.
Johnston said he plans to draft a response letter to the complaint. He will give the county commissioners and County Attorney Kevin Tankersley a chance to review it before sending it.
