With an ever-present, spiffy new annex building across the street as a comparison, Blaine County's Old Courthouse in Hailey is a reminder of a hometown passion for preserving heritage architecture as well as practicing admirable frugality with public funds.
But taxpayers surely would understand if Blaine County commissioners decided to spend on remodeling projects to improve county employees' working arrangements in the old courthouse as well as the public's use of courthouse meeting facilities.
Two urgent needs come to mind—the commissioners' own meeting room and the adjoining larger conference room.
Talk about cramped. As anyone attending meetings in their intimate quarters knows, three commissioners sit at desks in a room with eight folding chairs for the public, a few desk positions for staff and a closet cubbyhole for brewing coffee. Total area: about 300 square feet, maybe the nation's smallest county commission meeting room.
Just a short jog away is the conference room with audience seating for 100 in folding chairs, cavernous in design, outdated lighting, acoustics that leave audience members leaning forward to hear speakers. Area: perhaps 1,500 square feet
Modernizing and even expanding these rooms and providing more space is not a matter of cosmetic improvement of Blaine County's image. Very practical needs are involved.
Blaine County as well as other divisions of local government are tackling more public projects that attract more public attention and participation, and almost inevitably involve public hearings with overflow crowds in one of the few large meeting rooms in a government building.
The search for a new airport site is a case in point. Controversial as it is, meetings of the Friedman Memorial Airport Authority and its site selection committee in the old courthouse conference room usually leave people standing, some outside the main room in hallways.
Understandably, those who cannot find space in the conference room, or cannot hear speakers because of poor acoustics and no P.A. system, feel cheated in their civic participation.
Conducting citizen government in inadequate surroundings is really indefensible and an impediment to public participation.
But it's also ironic. The community is in the midst of discussing other major public projects—a new $100 million airport and widening and modernizing state Highway 75 for many tens of millions of dollars—while governing from rooms that would've made our grandfathers proud but are unfitting for 21st century county government.
