Lexington Herald Leader Editorial: Injudicious Building Binge.

Injudicious building binge

The future could be made brighter for many Kentuckians with almost $1 billion in state spending. That's one reason an $880 million courthouse-building binge should outrage taxpayers.

Other reasons: Almost no accountability, public participation or competition to hold down costs.

A host of troubling questions arise from "Law and Mortar," the story of former Chief Justice Joseph Lambert's edifice complex, as chronicled by Herald-Leader reporters Linda B. Blackford and Greg Kocher.

Especially troubling is that Lambert and the Administrative Office of the Courts shunned so many principles of good government as they pushed their aggressive public-works agenda over the past 10 years.

Of the three government branches, the judiciary is expected to be above politics and hold the others to ethical standards, which makes the whiff of sweetheart deals all the more unsavory.

As Blackford reported, the contracts for new judicial centers have been awarded without competitive bidding. Two politically connected firms — Codell Construction and Ross Sinclaire & Associates — have gotten most of the financing and construction contracts.

Lambert hired his personal architect to oversee the program. The process for choosing and funding 65 projects was codified in a bill sponsored by Rep. Bob Damron, D-Nicholasville, who works for Ross Sinclaire, which also once employed Lambert's son.

Codell employees have given $193,500 to Kentucky politicians since 2000, including $3,500 to Lambert's wife and $61,000 to local officials, including many who have a say in decisions about judicial centers.

The company president's father, James Codell III, was transportation secretary under Gov. Paul Patton and controlled the blacktop coveted by local officials.

Meanwhile, average citizens and preservation professionals are frozen out of the decision-making as the AOC wages architectural genocide on historic downtowns.

County officials have seats on the project development boards, but decisions are controlled by grandiose statewide building specifications and the AOC.

Lambert has claimed the building program as "his greatest legacy." But the legislature deserves a big share of the credit, or blame, since it approved AOC budgets.

None of this is to suggest that modernized courtrooms and new judicial centers aren't needed, or that small towns shouldn't share in capital spending.

What's wrong is the lack of innovation and imagination going into these decisions. Rather than looking to hold down costs and adapt existing buildings, the drive has been to tear down the old and put up something as big and expensive as possible.

No thought was given to creating regional justice centers, even though circuit courts are divided into multicounty districts.

Lambert seemed flabbergasted when asked if fewer regional justice centers could substitute for one in each of 120 counties.

"I could not make an intellectually honest case to give less to Robertson County than to Fayette County,'' he said, displaying the kind of thinking that has held Kentucky back: Government scatters the spoils across the state and invests in projects, not people. A smarter state would deploy scarce resources more strategically.

While small counties got huge justice centers, Kentucky's court workers' pay stagnated to the point that lawmakers ordered Lambert to put $13.7 million over the next two years into raises for deputy court clerks. He refused.

His successor, Chief Justice John D. Minton Jr., plans to comply with the budget mandate and wants to re-evaluate the building program in light of the budget crisis that's starving education and other services. Certainly, someone should.