Cawley And Martin's (Court) House Of Pain

This Doylestown Intelligencer story tells us that an “informational meeting” was recently held concerning the proposed “Bucks County Justice Center” with about 40 people (mostly Democrats) attending, and they had a lot of questions for Commissioner Jim Cawley (no word on whether or not Charley “I Have A Semi-Open Mind” Martin attended)…

“There's a lot we're dealing with now on faith,” said Doylestown Council President Det Ansinn, a Democrat. “Your professional staff had said the project will be done by 2015. That's a long run of faith.”

And (Cawley) assured Ansinn and the others that their faith is not misplaced.

“We would not ask permission to build this project if we were not committed to the whole project,” Cawley said.

“It's not fiscally responsible to tear down the parking garage just to build a new one and not build a justice center.”

However, we have this a bit later in the story…

Cawley said the commissioners do not want to build the justice center, but they have to.

Upon reading that, my first reaction is to blame Cawley for looking for a way out of this mess before ground has been broken, but to be fair, I should point out that a commenter to the Courier Times story noted that the Doylestown borough government passed an ordinance stipulating that the justice center be built “in the center of town.”

If that‘s true, then it was an act of rank stupidity for which Cawley and Martin are blameless. Also disturbing is this…

Asked to comment on the justice center plans, Democratic county Commissioner Diane Marseglia said she couldn't because she has not participated in any meetings about the proposed justice center. She suggested, though, that the county could build a new building for its administrative offices and keep its courtrooms in the existing courthouse.

I have too much respect for Diane to believe that she’s deliberately keeping herself “out of the loop” here, especially since Diane and Steve Santarsiero (noted here) both supported a “scaled-down” version of the justice center when they ran for county commissioners last year. If I’m correct in my suspicion that Cawley and Martin are deliberately freezing her out, then that’s unconscionable.

Like many others, I frequent Doylestown proper a good deal, and it is a place ill suited for construction; this is why I oppose both the current plan – whatever exactly it is, besides the garage, and based on some of Cawley and Diane’s non-answers, I’m wondering if the plan even exists – and Diane’s suggestion about moving the administrative offices and renovating the existing facility.

Because the center of Doylestown is essentially a locale with streets better designed for the horse-and-buggy era as opposed to now, the first thing to do is to abolish the ordinance stipulating the location of the site. The second thing to do, upon finding a new location elsewhere in the borough, is create a design for and compute the cost of a new facility, and not just the parking garage.

I know this is going to cost a ton of dough, but as a taxpayer, I, like most everyone else, want to see this done right, politics or no.