McCutcheon provides insight on plans for new Madison County Courthouse

HUNTSVILLE — In his State of the County address this week, Madison County Commission Chairman Mac McCutcheon provided details about the new county courthouse.

While the courthouse itself may still be in the planning stages, city and county officials are taking an active role in designing it. Among them is McCutcheon, who said the commission should have a feasibility study on the project completed by next spring.

“It is a lot of square footage,” McCutcheon said. “And really, when we started looking at the area and we started thinking about whether we remodeled or whether we just tore that building down, where would we put the courts? And is there a location in Madison County that would have the square footage needed to house the court system?

“The structure that they had over on Fountain Circle, the old inspection department, the old what they call the old library, Huntsville Library Building, we’re looking at that property there as a possibility. I emphasize a possibility, nothing has been confirmed in that.”

He noted that a shorter-term strategy would be to construct a separate building for the judiciary system at a different location from the current courthouse while dismantling it so that other county-related business can be conducted at the location.

“This would allow us to have a smaller space because we would only be housing the administrative offices of the county in that building, which we would have a smaller footprint, which would allow the outside area of the courthouse to be more pedestrian friendly,” McCutcheon said. “Because the downtown area has gotten to the point where you’ve got a residential area downtown.”

McCutcheon said the county is now financially in a position to build the courthouse.

“It’s a very big economic project and it’s going to take several years to do this,” he said. “We can make this happen. What we’ve got to do is make sure that we make the right decisions that are best for our county government to function and to be compatible with the downtown area.”