JASPER COUNTY, Mo. — Three years and $35 million later – Jasper County now officially has a new courts building. This morning was a chance to show it off before operations kicked off, drawing a big crowd.
The new Jasper County Courts Building is ready for business.
“It is gorgeous. It’s spacious – it’s very organized. It seems to be an efficient layout and it’s, it’s going to serve this community very well,” said Ken Surbrugg, Joplin Resident.
More than a hundred people toured the site, starting with a ribbon cutting ceremony. Heightened security is just one new feature, both for visitors coming in the front door, as well as officials and even inmates entering from secure underground parking.
“The prime thing that we wanted to accomplish was security for our key personnel. And so we spent a lot of effort in fulfilling that. We wanted it to be friendly and easy. For the people that came and I hope we’ve accomplished that. And then thirdly, we wanted our employees to have a place that that they can be proud to come to proud to be a part of,” said Darieus Adams, Jasper County Commissioner.
The footprint of the new building is organized with county elected officials offices nearest the front door.
“Absolutely. I would say everything is your state of the art. I know technology changes daily, but we’d spent a lot of time, a lot of effort. A lot of research went into maximizing flows and being comfortable at your job and giving them all the benefits that they did have a need to use that to help in their jobs,” said Adams.
Court operations sit on the west side of the first floor and throughout the second floor.
“I would compare that with any federal courthouse in the United States, the technology, the security components are just top notch. Matter of fact, this building has three areas of circulation as a public circulation, and employee circulation and security circulation, and none of those touch each other. And so there’s no co-mingling potential, which is one of the big problems that we had in the old courts building as well as a lot of courthouses across the United States,” said Theis.
Nearly the whole building will open for business at 8:30 Monday morning.
The County Collector’s Office is the exception, where they say they’ll need at least one more day to make sure everything is operating properly.