Editor’s note: This article is by Tommy Gardner, of the Stowe Reporter, in which it was first published June 4, 2015.
[A] hotel in Morristown now has a metal detector in the entranceway. Soon, all manner of traffic scofflaws, civil litigants and soon-to-be divorced couples will pass through it, and a murder trial could take place in the hotel conference room.
Welcome to the new Lamoille County Courthouse, occupying the vacant Plaza Hotel for the next year or so while the historic Hyde Park courthouse undergoes a major renovation that’s been years in the making and could cost up to $9 million.
The temporary location is in Morristown’s first strip mall, the Northgate Plaza, and is flanked by a pool supply/wine store on one side and a sporting goods store on the other.
The hotel now houses Lamoille County’s criminal, civil, probate and family court offices, and the office of the county clerk and assistant judges, all in former guest rooms that have been renovated but still display gold-tinted room numbers on the door.
Court administrator Kathleen Hobart said the hotel is suitable for handling everything the aging courthouse could handle. All the phone numbers are the same; all the same staff members are working with the all the same files. Now, though, staff members for all branches of the court — family, probate, civil and criminal — will be in the same room, a trio of hotel rooms with the walls between them knocked out and transformed into an efficient arm of the government.
Howard Manosh, arguably Morristown’s most famous businessman, owns the Plaza and has leased the hotel to the county for a year, about as long as it’s expected to take to give the Hyde Park courthouse a major facelift.
“I built this in 1986 as a hotel, so it was dated a bit,” Manosh said. “The renovations enhanced it very well. Every office has its own bathroom, plus heat and A/C units. And it already had a good conference room. The skylights were put in when I built it.”
Plus, as a couple of court staffers mentioned last week, the lunch options near the new digs are a lot more varied than in Hyde Park village.
Hotel does the job
That well-lit conference room is now the main courtroom, the centerpiece of the temporary quarters, with the judge’s bench on one side of the room, folding wooden chairs facing it on the far side, and a plush teal floor giving a brightness to the newly painted white walls. The judge’s bench is not as imposing or, literally, elevated as the one the courtroom that Hobart called the “Atticus Finch-style room” of the 104-year-old brick building in Hyde Park.
But, Hobart said, it will do. The new location, on the second floor of the Plaza Hotel, is at least the same size as the courthouse is.
However, the renovations that update the courthouse in the next year will add 8,000 square feet of office space to the building. The work will also address a lengthy list of problems the old building presents for a Vermont judiciary trying to serve the law-and-order needs of Lamoille County residents.
Even the hotel offers greater security, privacy and efficiency than the 1911 courthouse. The only way to reach the second-floor area where the court offices, jury deliberation room, judge’s chambers and lawyer/client areas is through the security area on the first floor.
The public comes in the front door, the employees come in the back door, and prisoners are transported via a third entrance that used to be a loading dock, where they can be kept out of sight of potential jurors and witnesses.
The Hyde Park courthouse elevator has a window that sometimes needed to be taped up so people couldn’t see prisoners, and Hobart said a mistrial was once called because jurors got a peek at a defendant being transported up the telephone-booth-sized elevator.
Unlike the openness of the courthouse, the temporary quarters have a more narrow feel — it is a hotel, after all — and a long hallway that makes a square-shaped loop around the middle conference room-turned-courtrooms. Gone are the beds, dressers and TVs, replaced by desks, bookshelves and computers.
Manosh also owns the Sunset Motel just up the street, and he closed the Plaza about five years ago because both hotels were running at only about 60 percent occupancy. He said he was thinking about turning the hotel into office space and renting it out anyway, so the renovations to make it the working center of county business, judicial and otherwise, gives him a good start. But then again, he said, the way Morrisville is growing these days, maybe it could use another hotel again.
Although he’s not looking that far down the road. Said the local business icon, who’s been doing business in town for more than 50 years, “At my age, I don’t even buy green bananas.”
