Published: April 04, 2007 11:57 pm      

NIAGARA FALLS: Courthouse crumbles

NIAGARA FALLS — Crumbling concrete, rotting railings, exposed asbestos and mounting amounts of mold.

Welcome to the Niagara Falls Public Safety Building.

Those who visit and work there every day have growing concerns that the home of the city’s cops and courts may be named for safety, but is anything but safe.

“When I walk in every day, I wonder how much longer is it going to stay up,” said Carolyn Henry, a legal assistant in the Niagara County Public Defender’s Office. “There are so many problems here; you wonder how long (the building) will stand.”

Henry’s concerns are no exaggeration. In the main lobby on the building’s second floor, duct tape holds a large window together.

With crime scene tape in front of it, you might think a body bounced off the glass. In reality, the shaking and settling of the building caused the window to crack.

“There is no doubt in my mind that this building is an accident waiting to happen,” said Chief City Court Clerk Martha Farbo-Lincoln.

Farbo-Lincoln has spent 32 years working in the Public Safety Building and has watched it slowly fall into disrepair. You don’t have to look far to find structural faults — there is more police crime scene tape stretched around problem areas at the Public Safety Building then there is on Cataract City streets.

“At one point every public entrance into this building was blocked,” Farbo-Lincoln said.

Concrete steps leading into the building have deteriorated. As the steps crumbled, railings came loose and created additional hazards.

“There is a concern that the underlying factors surrounding (safety) in this building are never addressed,” Farbo-Lincoln said. “The railings (on the front entrance stairs) didn’t get fixed until a man with a cane fell and almost pulled the railing down.”

The fix was to weld the railing with an iron brace. Other railings in the building are held together with duct tape.

“Someone is going to get seriously hurt,” said John Eodice, a retired Falls police officer who works in the building running the police credit union. “You can see it getting worse every day.”

Even potential jurors have experienced the continuing deterioration of the building.

“We had jurors in the jury room and a ceiling tile fell on one woman’s head,” Farbo-Lincoln said. “It was saturated with water and mold.”

Henry has had to stop using the building’s adjacent parking on 31st Street because the bridge over Gill Creek that links the lot to the Public Safety Building is also swathed in yellow tape. Large chunks of concrete have crumbled off and iron bars that reinforce the cement are hanging into the water.

“I wondered about those missing chunks of concrete,” Henry said. “I won’t go across (the bridge) now.”

People who work in the building believe the severity of the facility’s problems have increased dramatically in the last two years. Some now wonder if the building may soon become structurally unsound.

“I don’t know if the building is what you would call ‘solid,’” Farbo-Lincoln said. “I receive concerns (over safety) on a daily basis from employees and the general public.”

The downward spiral in the condition of the Public Safety Building comes as the city struggles to build a new cops and courts complex.

That project has been bogged down by disputes over its size, scope, cost, who should build it and what it should look like. Despite state requests made in 2005 that a new complex would be ready to go by 2007, not a single shovel of dirt has been dug at the Main Street site where construction will take place.

“The only thing I can say is in May 2005 I presented a contract from Yorkshire Development, which was selected by a committee, and they had a timeline to complete a building by the end of this year,” Mayor Vince Anello said. “The City Council rejected that contract.”

The city is working with a team led by Ciminelli Development Co. of Williamsville to develop designs for a new public safety building on north Main Street. The new building is now slated to open in 2009.

Anello said the dramatic deterioration at the building in the two years since the city began planning for a new public safety complex is a cause for serious concern.

“I’ve been concerned all along,” the mayor said. “I’m trying to make the best of a bad situation. I think people need to pay attention to what we’ve seen in the last two years.”

Still, with completion of construction for a new public safety complex at least two more years down the road, those sentenced to work at the current Public Safety Building are wondering what that facility will be like in 2009.

“I can’t imagine,” Farbo-Lincoln said.