BROOKINGS (10-7-26) — The Brookings County Courthouse cupola will need some repairs.
At yesterday’s meeting, the Brookings County Commission heard a report from Matthew Weiss with Design Arc Group. He said decades of freeze and thaw have caused the cupola dome on the roof to start showing its age… “If water gets behind stone, it is liable to then push the stone out a little bit over the course of time. Now those stones are in the vicinity of 24 inches thick and they’re starting to separate by maybe a degree of a half-inch, three-quarter inches, inch at most.”
He said the cupola needs repair — but it’s not an emergency… “This isn’t an immediate structural concern. I would maybe speculate you could see another 50 years or so before the thing falls; but this is something that eventually I believe the county will need to essentially buy — what was the word we use? — a stabilization approach.”
Weiss outlined the cost estimate… “It boils down to two things — masonry work and window restoration, as we present. And those total hard cost that you may expect to see in a contractor’s bid come to roughly $236 thousand, and then the soft cost or the development costs by the owner separately are all listed below and those roughly would tally something in the vicinity of $48 thousand for a total to the project of $285 thousand.”
The current Brookings County Courthouse was built in 1912.
— Brookings Radio News
