News

County picks local-national partnership to manage courthouse-jail project

By Bill Moss, Published: April 4, 2023

Embarking on the largest capital project in the history of Henderson County, county commissioners in a 3-2 vote Monday night chose a global design-build firm and Hendersonville-based Cooper Construction Co. to guide the construction of a Grove Street courthouse addition and jail expansion projected to cost at least $150 million.

Commissioners voted to hire Haskell Corp., a Jacksonville, Florida-based design, engineering and construction company with 20 offices nationwide, and Cooper as construction managers of the project.

“We did a partnership,” Tom Cooper said Monday night, noting that Haskell was a large corporation that had the experience and wherewithal for the courthouse-jail job.

Haskell, a global design-build firm with more than 2,000 architects, engineers and construction managers, says on its website that it delivers more than $1.5 billion worth of work annually on complex capital projects worldwide.

Commissioners David Hill and Michael Edney joined Chair Rebecca McCall in voting to hire the Haskell-Cooper team. Commissioners Bill Lapsley and Daniel Andreotta voted for Vannoy Construction Co., which has developed a rapport with county leaders and a sterling reputation as the general contractor for the Pardee-Wingate-Blue Ridge Community College health sciences building and cancer center, the Hendersonville High School construction and renovation and a major renovation at on the BRCC campus. All five commissioners said choosing the so-called construction manager at risk was a close call among Haskell-Cooper, Vannoy and a third design-build contractor, Ajax.

“It’s the hardest decision ever made, and I don’t take these decisions lightly,” McCall said before casting the decisive vote. “My decision was very close, extremely close. I struggled with it all weekend — back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. But I have that woman’s intuition and I have to go with my gut, and I’m gonna go with Haskell Cooper.”

Fentress Architects, an international design firm that provided conceptual planning and preliminary design for the new judicial center, presented three- and five-story options to the board, each around 94,000 square feet. In a 3-2 vote in December commissioners chose the five-story option.

McCall cautioned that the board’s decision to choose a construction manager does not signal that the county has committed to the entire project. “Making this decision allows us to start making some decisions” about the next steps, she said. Commissioners have discussed separating the project into two phases and are expected to decide how to proceed once Haskell-Cooper develops a more solid cost projection.

“We have three decisions to make,” McCall said in December after commissioners voted for the five-story courthouse addition. “Do we do the courthouse first, the jail first or both together? Right now I feel personally the jail and detention center is the most urgent need.” She noted then that the projected overall cost had already risen from $127 million to around $150 million.

Still to be determined is the location of parking — since the courthouse expansion footprint is on the existing northside lot — and whether to move the offices currently at 100 N. King St. into the expanded courthouse complex.