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Marion County officials and a special task force will consider which actions to take next after a $1.5 million found significant and expensive repairs would be needed to shore up the structurally unsound Courthouse Square building in Salem.

Among the findings was that remediation of the main building could cost nearly $40 million in total – compared to a replacement cost of about $46 million.

The 10-year-old structure and associated complex cost $34 million when it was initially built.

“The proposal involves coming in with steel beams under the existing floors, basically to shore everything up,” said Dave Henderson, Marion County’s business services director. “It would clearly be an extensive process to get that done.”

The study also recommended a $9.6 million replacement of the bus mall and a $147,926 demolition of the structure’s north block, which was intended for future use.

The investigation was conducted by Miller Consulting Engineers and SERA Architects of Portland.

Now that the report is finished, the 30-member Courthouse Square Solutions Task Force will take a deeper look at the data before it makes a final decision on what it will do with the site, said Jolene Kelley, a spokeswoman for the county.

“This is really just a starting point,” she said.

The task force, which includes three county commissioners, four members of the transit board and citizens from the local community, on Feb. 4 will begin meeting to discuss options, Henderson added.

“The task force wants to look at all the options – not just the ones presented in the report,” Henderson said.

The county had to move all of its offices out of the Courthouse Square building in September after the structure was declared “dangerous” and an attached transit mall was declared “imminently dangerous” by the city of Salem.

The study said the problems were caused by poor design, poor materials and problematic construction methods.

The county has tried to recoup losses wherever possible. It settled a lawsuit with contractor Pence/Kelly Construction for $900,000, and settled other suits with five subcontractors for $269,000 and with Arbuckle Costic Architects Inc. for $695,000.

A $1 million lawsuit with Century West Engineering is still in mitigation, and the county is still discussing its $29 million insurance claim with Affiliated FM.

The low cost of the settlements wasn’t ideal, but it was all the county felt it could get, Henderson added.

“The issue there is (whether) they have any assets that we might have been able to go after if we had gone to court,” Henderson said. “And they had almost no assets, so we felt we should settle and get what we could, rather than have them waste what few assets they had defending themselves from the lawsuit.”

The findings themselves weren’t a huge surprise to Henderson, but he said details of the shoddy work still cause him to shake his head.

Among the things the investigators found were bits of construction debris cast into the concrete ceiling of the bus mall, support columns that were too narrow to sufficiently hold up the top floors of the building and bent, unrepaired rebar sticking out of casting beds.

Sawdust also got into some of the concrete poured for the support structures, weakening it, Henderson said.

“There are spots where you can easily stick a screwdriver a few inches into what’s supposed to be concrete,” Henderson said. “In other places you can actually see ridges of rebar at the surface of concrete, rather than inside the structure.”

Of the major causes, the report blamed:

• “Poor design: inadequately designed structural elements, many significantly above code limits or beyond industry standards.”
• “Poor materials: significantly lower than specified concrete strength due to high water to cement ratios, excessive microfractures and debonding of the cement paste.”
• “Problematic construction: Poor consolidation of the concrete has resulted in water and air voids. Insufficient site supervision has resulted in debris in casting fields. A lax quality control environment has resulted in migration of concrete mixes.”

The county had to move offices from the building to several locations across Salem. Relocation cost $930,000 and three-year leases for the new offices cost $2.2 million, Henderson said.

Officials are still working through proposals for a forensic investigation requested on Nov. 29, and the county hasn’t yet decided on a contractor. That study would look at how all of this happened in the first place in hope of preventing anything similar from happening in the future.

“It’s scary, isn’t it?” Henderson said.