Ribbon cut on new $313M Clackamas County Courthouse

OREGON CITY, Ore. (KOIN) -- After years of construction - and more time debating whether it was affordable - the ribbon was cut on the new Clackamas County Courthouse in Oregon City on Saturday.

The old courthouse was built nearly 100 years ago. As the population of the county grew from 50,000 to 400,000, they ran out of courtroom space, space for judges and space to safely move people.

"The (Clackamas) County Commission had already recognized in the 1960s that our current courthouse wasn't going to serve the needs of the community for years to come," District Attorney John Wentworth said.

But the fate of the old courthouse remains up in the air.

"If there's an opportunity for someone to come in and transform the courthouse into something that's usable, fantastic," Wentworth said. "But if it means getting rid of the old courthouse and actually putting something in that serves the downtown community better than that, that's what should happen."

Former County Chair Tootie Smith, who likened the 4 year process to get the courthouse built to childbirth as "the longest labor anybody had ever performed in history," said any potential buyer can "do whatever they can to it to make it a prosperous downtown commercial venture."

The state allocated 14 judges to Clackamas County but the old courthouse only had room for 11. The DA said the extra space "will allow us to provide faster access to justice for people who need a judge to make a decision either on a child support matter or a divorce or in a criminal case."

Another feature of the new courthouse is that inmates will not need to be transported in a public area.

"You can imagine how frightening that was. You know, sexual abusers, abusers, ex-husbands," said former Clackamas County Chair Jim Bernard. "All those things are very challenging. And then you also had, you know, criminals who murdered people and all kinds of things just walking the hallways."

The Energy Trust manager Shelly Carlton said the new courthouse "will save about as much energy as 10 average homes would use" over the course of a year with its solar power in the parking lot.

The $313 million project needed "a lot of blood, sweat and tears," Smith said, "to convince people that, number one, we could afford to do it the right side of the budget. We took some really unusual steps, saved a lot of money, and we were able to build this courthouse without raising taxes."

The courthouse will open to the public on May 19.