Historic cards to be placed in new flagpole

The Spokane County Courthouse is expected to have a new flagpole by the end of the year – and another time capsule no one can reach.

The 50-foot flagpole was removed Dec. 1, 10 days after a windstorm left the 2,000-pound steel pipe leaning about 4 degrees from the top of the courthouse’s 168-foot-tall tower.

When a crane crew delivered the pole to Facilities Director Ron Oscarson, he noticed a bullet had passed through the decorative copper ball at the top. He shone a tiny flashlight into one of the bullet holes and discovered several heavily weathered business cards.

It turned out that lightning destroyed the 1895-vintage courthouse’s original flagpole, and tradesmen who replaced it in October 1919 put their cards in the ball to commemorate the occasion.

Now, Oscarson hopes to laminate the cards and put them in a new flagpole ball “along with our little explanation of what we did.”

“Maybe we’ll put a plaque down below because I don’t think we’d have found that stuff if it hadn’t been for that bullet hole,” he said.

The new flagpole will be about 35 feet tall and lighter, thanks to anodized aluminum that won’t need to be painted every few years by a steeplejack.

The work will be paid with a $1 million state historic preservation grant the county received last month. The grant will cover extensive renovation of the courthouse’s first and second floors. It requires a $1 million match and state approval of construction plans.

Oscarson said about 6,000 square feet of now-unoccupied space on the first floor will be renovated as office space next year, along with aesthetic improvements to the courthouse entrance.

Renovation of some 2,500 square feet of storage space on the second floor will start late next year and be completed in 2009. Old records are to be scanned or moved to other locations so the space can be converted to office use.

Plans call for swapping the second-floor auditor’s office with the ground-floor Family Law Court, allowing security scanners to be removed from the first floor.

The remodeling is intended to reduce the county’s need to rent space in the nearby Monroe Court Building at 901 N. Monroe St. Just last week, county commissioners approved a two-year, $5,033-a-month lease for 3,553 square feet of additional space in the Monroe Court Building to relieve crowding in the Building and Planning Department.

At the same time, though, commissioners tentatively agreed to spend slightly more than $1 million in general fund money to finish renovating the county-owned Gardner Center building at 1033 W. Gardner Ave.

Election workers and the public defender’s office already occupy about two-thirds of the converted industrial building. Some of the new space will go to 10 recently hired assistant public defenders and several new state-paid children’s advocates in the Juvenile Court Services Department.