County to Hold Court in Chatsworth : Long-Awaited Facility to Open in October 2001

Groundbreaking for a long-awaited county courthouse in Chatsworth, scheduled to be built in the early 1990s until fiscal woes ground the project to a halt, will officially take place Thursday morning, county officials announced.

The $59-million Municipal Court building will go up on a vacant 9-acre parcel of land at 9425 Penfield Ave., near the corner of Winnetka Ave. and Prairie Street. It is scheduled to open in October 2001.

Los Angeles County officials said the new building--the third municipal courthouse in the San Fernando Valley and the first on its west side--will handle about half a million visitors each year. The Valley also has municipal courthouses in Van Nuys and San Fernando.

“We’re really very excited, because this takes a lot of the pressure off of the surrounding courthouses,” said Jean Huston, justice deputy for Supervisor Mike Antonovich.

Fred Gaines, president of the San Fernando Valley Bar Assn., said he was elated.

“It’s long overdue,” he said. “The courts in the Valley are in great need of additional facilities, and this is going to be right in the middle of a Valley area that had no other facilities.”

Antonovich had voiced opposition to the Chatsworth site in the past, mainly because he wanted the county to build a new facility in Lancaster first. But Huston said Antonovich and Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky--a longtime proponent of the Chatsworth courthouse because much of his constituency is in the West Valley--were working hand-in-hand on the project.

Huston said Antonovich remains steadfast in his demand for a new courthouse in the Antelope Valley. “We just feel this puts us one step closer,” to building a facility in the Antelope Valley, she said.

The Chatsworth building will have a compact, modern design with a granite exterior and ceramic tile interior. It will contain 10 courtrooms on four levels, three of them above ground. Parking for 750 cars will be available.

The courthouse will have improved security features, including the latest video surveillance system and built-in check points that are better designed than those in other courthouses, said Robert Quist, the project manager overseeing development for the county’s new court buildings.

The groundbreaking is a small step toward concluding one of Los Angeles County’s most recent financial and management missteps. Prompted by a 1986 state law aimed at easing overcrowding and improving judicial efficiency by building more courthouses, the county came up with an ambitions courthouse construction program.

The master plan was to build new courtrooms in Chatsworth, Lancaster, the South Bay, North Hollywood, Santa Monica, Pasadena, southeast Los Angeles County and Long Beach. A decade after those plans were made, however, most of the buildings had not been built and courtroom overcrowding was worse than ever in Los Angeles.

Last year, an auditor asked to look into why the courthouse plans were not taking shape skewered the county for spending millions of dollars without adding a single new courtroom. Despite warnings from building consultants that its development plans were far too ambitious, the county continued with its plans, the audit found, overlooking budgetary constraints and a shortage of revenue from parking tickets, which help fund new construction.

The county spent $9.9 million readying designs for the sites and $8.7 million to acquire land, but the few courtrooms that were built merely replaced courtrooms no longer in use.

By the time the auditor’s report was released, Quist said, the county had recovered, paving the way for construction to take place. The master plan was scaled back about four years ago, when the county decided to pare its construction priorities to three sites: the Chatsworth courthouse, a courthouse presently under construction and preparing to open in October near Los Angeles International Airport and a courthouse in the Antelope Valley, he said.

The original plans were blindsided by unforeseen circumstances, such as the recession of the early ‘90s and the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which resulted in a need to redesign the Chatsworth courthouse to meet new earthquake safety standards, Quist said.