Courthouse annex elevators may get emergency repairs

By By Steve Gillespie / staff Writer
April 18, 2003
Lauderdale County supervisors will be asked on Monday to approve spending about $120,000 in reserve funds to fix the elevators in the Raymond P. Davis Courthouse Annex.
At a work session Thursday, County Administrator Rex Hiatt said only one of the elevators is working and it has begun to get stuck occasionally.
Both Hiatt and District 2 Supervisor Jimmie Smith said they have gotten stuck in the elevator recently.
Some of the elevators' components are obsolete, according to representatives with Kone Inc., formerly the Montgomery Elevator Company, of Mobile, Ala.
Hiatt said the elevators apparently date back to the early 1970s. The estimated cost to upgrade the elevators is about $61,000 each.
Last year, supervisors were prepared to spend about $250,000 to repair the elevators more extensively. The project would have been paid for with a low-interest $5 million line of credit with the state.
The elevators, however, had to wait after a group of county residents petitioned against the idea of borrowing money and the board of supervisors scrapped its line of credit proposal.
Road equipment, road work and an expansion to the juvenile detention center were some of the other projects the line of credit was to have financed.
Smith said he considers the condition of the elevators to be a serious problem. He told fellow board members that he recently got stuck on the 11th floor of the annex, where supervisors' offices are, and that the elevator jerked when it stopped.