Cortez: Pandemic impacted construction of new county courthouse

Everyday someone asks me the status of the (Hidalgo County) courthouse. And, as you know, the courthouse was contracted out before I became county judge.

It was a process of going out for bids, designing it, etcetera. A contractor was selected and there’s a contract.

So, when you have already selected the contractor and you already have a contract, then that’s what I inherited. That’s what I heard. That’s what we inherited the present (county) commission.

And as we went through the process, we also hired a project manager. So, here we had a designer that designed the courthouse. We have a contractor to build the courthouse. We had a project manager to make sure that the contractor was doing what he was supposed to be doing based on the design. So, we had all of those precautions. We had all those things in place to hopefully get us a good courthouse.

And if there was any violation of any duties, we had a legal contract that said, hey, here’s the duties that each one has. So, that’s what we have to deal with.

So, when a contractor hasn’t fulfilled properly its duty to finish the courthouse, then our only recourse is what are the legal rights within the contract. So, that’s what we have been doing. That’s what we have been doing and so far, the issues that have occurred, we’ve been trying to resolve them.

And we have what we call life and safety issues. These are the serious issues, and then we have other cosmetic types of issues. We’re pretty well down… that we’ve eliminated most of our life and safety issues. And we’re dealing with what we would call cosmetic, which is basically the stucco issue.

But here we are, during the process of constructing this courthouse, we went through a pandemic, a 100-year pandemic. One thing that happens once in 100 years that had an interruption, and that construction had an interruption in our ability to be able to put people to construct it and our ability to get supplies. Then as we kept going through the through the process, other issues surfaced. So, yes, it’s taken longer than we wanted it to.

But we want the best courthouse that is (well) designed. We want it to be right. We want it to be correct. We don’t want to have anybody in there unless it’s the way it should be. And right now, it’s not. So, we want to make sure that we don’t move in there until it is perfect control, it is right. And, and we’re getting there. But again, we have limitations as to what the agreement between us and the contractor says, and that’s taken a little longer than what we would like it to be.

As county judge, I have a duty to get it done, to get it right for our people as soon as possible. We are working right now as efficiently as we can to do just that. When you start a journey… and certainly the first explorers who were going east to west, they didn’t know where to go. So, you have to adjust as you go. That’s where we are right now. We trying to find that model that works. And the best thing that I can tell the people of the Rio Grande Valley is that we have a lot of people that are very talented, very experienced wanting to find that solution and we’re all working together.

Editor’s Note: The above commentary was provided by Hidalgo County Judge Richard Cortez to the Rio Grande Guardian during a video interview held at his office in Edinburg. Cortez discussed two or three issues. The above commentary is what he said about the new Hidalgo County Courthouse.

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