Commissioners discuss concerns about County Annex building deterioration

County commissioners expressed concerns at their Monday, July 10, meeting about structural issues with the Gonzales County Annex building on Sarah DeWitt Drive.

They authorized County Judge Pat Davis as well as County Building Maintenance employees Scott McNabb and Brian Kloesel to meet with three different structural engineering firms — one from Victoria and two from Austin — to get proposals for how best to solve the problems, which include large cracks in walls and missing pieces of concrete.

“Brian and I looked at the Annex Building and it's got some pretty serious cracking in it,” McNabb told commissioners. “If you go in to the back door, where the garage used to be … you can walk up there remove a section of concrete, just like a brick, that hole was two inches deep. If you go into metal door into the back, on the wall, looking at the sheriff's department, we can see daylight through the hole in the corner. It's got a pretty good crack on the outside and in it’s coming down in two or three spots where you can start to see daylight like the walls are coming out.”

McNabb said he has had to warn some of the employees to pull up their vehicles in the sallyport because “a lot of that concrete, around the tilt walls, looks like it’s folding, like it’s popping off.”

“On the inside of that wall, there's a chunk of concrete. laying in there, that probably weighs 20 pounds,” McNabb added. “We measured one of those spots where it popped up and it's about three inches deep. And today, if you look at the corner of the wall, by the DPS office, that wall has got a crack in it. If you go to the other side, to the Ag Extension office, they also have that one's pretty bad, too.

“We don't want anything to start really falling out of there. There’s lots of places on the inside in that back room, where that concrete is falling off, you can see the rebar and the cabling and stuff. It's pretty rusty.

“If that chunk of concrete that was in the back had fallen out of the wall and hit somebody,it would have hurt them pretty bad,” McNabb said.

Davis said he and McNabb were asking for permission from the court to have the structural engineering firms examine the building and “maybe give us an estimate on what they think needs to be done.”

“We then can bring it back to the court and we can go from there, but I think we probably need to move on this pretty quick,” Davis said.

Davis said he has done some research on how tilt walls get fixed and “they come in there with some type of epoxy, where they go into the wall and they shoot it in there and it adheres to it and seals it.”

Precinct 2 Commissioner Donnie Brzozowski noted the Annex Building “was built in either 1982 or 1983 and you would think the concrete would have lasted a lot longer than it did.”

Commissioners then voted unanimously to allow Davis, McNabb and Kloesel to meet with the firms and bring back proposals.

In other action, the court approved the records archive plan for the County Clerk’s office and the continuation of the $10 Record Archives Fee after holding a public hearing.

County Clerk Lona Ackman said the fee is used to to fund the preservation and digitization of the county’s records. It comes from a filing fee that is charged when new records are filed with her office and is not a tax assessed to the county’s taxpayers.

“In order for the county clerk’s office to collect this fee, I must, every year, present to the commissioners court, every year, the Records Archive Plan, which hasn’t changed much since we’re still working on the same thing as these plans take several years to complete,” Ackman said. “The fund allows me to preserve and restore the records that are maintained in my office.”

She said that by the end of this fiscal year, the county will have imaged and indexed records dating back to 1950 for her office.

“Next year, we will be working on going from 1950 back to 1911,” Ackman said. “You can only use this fee to preserve and restore your records. The state had recognized that the Records Management fee we charge was not enough to preserve all the records maintained in the County Clerk’s office, so they created this fee to help implement the process of restoring and digitizing your records.”

If a natural disaster were to occur, any records which have been digitized can still be accessed without worrying they may have been lost forever, Ackman said.