The building housing Marquette’s federal courthouse and U.S. post office along West Washington Street is pictured. Courthouse renovations that aim to increase security are scheduled to begin in March and be completed in late 2020, officials said. (Journal photos by Cecilia Brown)

MARQUETTE — Renovations on Marquette’s federal courthouse that aim to increase security are scheduled to begin later this year.

The project, which is slated to start in March, seeks to “improve court security, consolidate court office space and improve the space utilization and function for the district court and U.S. Marshals Service,” according to a statement from the U.S. General Services Administration.

The multifaceted renovation project is estimated to cost around $5.1 million and take about two years, with completion anticipated in late 2020, GSA officials said. The construction contract for the renovation was awarded in November to Escanaba-based Industrial Maintenance Services Inc.

The renovations, which aim to improve security at the courthouse — particularly in regards to the transport of federal defendants in and out of the building — have been a long time in the making, officials said.

“We’ve been trying to address that for 25 years,” said Federal Magistrate Judge Timothy Greeley of the U.S. District Court’s Western District of Michigan.

The building will be reconfigured with the renovation, as a courtroom will be eliminated and a new elevator will be installed on the exterior of the building’s west side, which will provide a “secure entrance and exit into the building by people in custody,” Greeley said.

Furthermore, Greeley said they will be constructing “all new cells in this building that can be accessed by this new secure elevator,” explaining that while no one spends the night in the courthouse cells, they can be used to hold defendants for a few hours as they await a court appearance.

“If they are federal defendants or individuals who have been convicted of crimes and are back here on some other basis, they are processed by the U.S. Marshals Service here in this building, and they’re housed in this building before and immediately after their court appearances,” he said.

Part of what made the project possible, Greeley said, was reducing the federal court’s physical footprint in the building by eliminating a courtroom and moving to courtroom sharing.

“In 2014, a program was started whereas … if you could come up with a plan to reduce how much space you were occupying, you could get money for construction,” he said. “And we reduced our footprint here by over 1,000 square feet and got money to put into reconfigure this building.”

Greeley, who will be retiring in March, has worked with others in the federal government for years to address the need for additional security at the courthouse.

“It will be what I consider one of the more important accomplishments for this court that I played a role in, but there’s no way I would have been able to get this done by myself,” he said. “It took incredible amounts of work by judges and people in the general services administration and in the administrative office, but it’s a big deal.”

Because the federal courthouse is in the same building as the U.S. post office, Greeley said he wants the community to know that “every effort has been made to make sure this has as little negative impact on the public as possible.”

Furthermore, GSA officials said the “work will not impact the operations of the courts or the post office, and affected offices will relocate within the building when needed.”

Cecilia Brown can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 248. Her email address is cbrown@miningjournal.net.