by J. Brooks Terry
Staff Writer
City Council approved legislation last week allowing Clerk of the Courts Jim Fuller to lease space in the Southgate Plaza on Beach Boulevard.
Fuller said the 15,000 square-foot office will be renovated and converted into a “one stop” traffic center.
Court representatives said the deal — Fuller is authorized to enter into a 10-year lease agreement with Pentagon Properties — has been in the works since last summer.
“It took us a little while to get everything in place, but now we’re ready to go,” said Jack Sparrow, assistant clerk of the court who is serving as project manager for the new traffic center. “We think something like this is going to make life much easier for people who need to take care of different traffic-related matters.
“We hope to get started on the renovations as soon as possible.”
Per terms of the agreement, build-out costs and monthly payments will be covered by funds available in Fuller’s operating budget.
The annual rental rate will start at $221,250 and be increased by 2.5 percent every subsequent year.
As part of the new agreement, Sparrow said plans to close the court’s traffic violations office on Haines Street and build new facilities on A. Philip Randolph Boulevard have been nixed.
“Nothing against building a new building,” he said, “but we determined this to be a much more cost effective option for the City.
“We are, however, still closing our Haines Street building.”
Approximately 40 employees from that office will be transferred to Beach Boulevard once renovations are finished.
“We should have about 60 people working there,” said Sparrow. “It’s going to be much more efficient than our current system.
“We’ll have about 10 cashiers there compared to the two we have at Haines Street now.”
The reason for the move, said Sparrow, is the court’s relatively fragmented and sometimes confusing traffic operations.
“The way we have it set up now is that you have to go to all these different offices to take care of the various kinds of traffic citations,” he said. “There are civil citations and criminal citations. Within the criminal citations it’s even further broken down into misdemeanor and felony charges.
“There’s a different office to take care of each of those and, a lot of times, people make assumptions of where they need to go and wind up in the wrong place.”
Sparrow said users will be able to pay any traffic citation in the new office.
“This is the way it should be. It’s logistically much better for everyone,” he said. “There isn’t any reason our traffic division shouldn’t be all in one place.”
Courtrooms, traffic school registration and classes and the Department of Highway Safety also will be located in the office.
“You can even take care of a suspended license if you need to,” said Sparrow, “basically anything traffic-related will be right there.”
Barring complications, Sparrow said an early September move-in date followed by an opening about two weeks later is the most likely scenario.