Judges Eager for Courthouse Expansion

Facility in Greenbelt Designed for Growth

The federal courthouse in Greenbelt, which opened 14 years ago to serve Maryland's southern counties, including Montgomery, is running out of room.

For a visitor stepping through the building's front doors and into its atrium, space would hardly seem in short supply, with not a crowd or a line in sight.

Beyond the quiet, art-lined public corridors, however, a shortage of work space looms, as the U.S. District Court prepares for a near-certain increase in the number of judges and a corresponding need for more courtrooms and judicial offices.

Already, the federal probation services agency has been forced to relocate most of its Greenbelt staff to an office building off-site. Without a substantial courthouse expansion, the U.S. attorney's office could end up out of the Greenbelt courthouse as well, officials said.

The four-story, 237,000-square-foot building was designed to accommodate the requirements of the court for its first 10 years and was built on a site that could allow expansion over an additional 20 years. The need for more space was apparent to the judges within a year of the building's 1994 opening, however, and ever since, they have been pushing for an expansion.

The courthouse, built at a cost of $48 million to serve the District's Maryland suburbs, was a testament to the region's growing economic and political influence. Until then, almost all federal cases in Mary land had passed through Baltimore, and the legal community there had resisted splitting the district into two divisions.

Proponents of a site in the southern part of the state prevailed, securing a courthouse that principally serves Calvert, Charles, Montgomery, Prince George's and St. Mary's counties, where growing population and increasing development have kept the Greenbelt courthouse busy.

As Greenbelt has added judges over the years, space for them has been carved out wherever possible. The courthouse is home to four district judges, up from three in 1994; three bankruptcy judges, up from two; and four magistrate judges, up from two.

But the patchwork effort to accommodate that growth is approaching its limits, officials said, with more operations doubling up in cramped space.

The magistrate judges are sharing courtrooms in Greenbelt after the lease expired on space in the state District Court building in Hyattsville that the federal court had used for its petty offenses docket. The most recently appointed of the four magistrate judges has his chambers near a copy machine in the suite of offices that houses the clerks of the court, a location that is less secure than usually required.

And after unsuccessful efforts to lease space for the bankruptcy judges off-site, they, too, are sharing an area while a third bankruptcy hearing room and chambers are built in existing space.

And those are just the judges who don't have lifetime appointments.