When it comes to building courthouses, Multnomah County is having its troubles these days. As the O made glaringly clear last week, even the county commissioners can't get honest answers when it comes to planning for such projects. Take the new courthouse going in in East County, for example -- Commissioner Jeff Cogen pointedly asked last year whether the $16.35 million budget he was voting on was based on current, as opposed to stale, projections. Here's the exchange, which was caught on tape:

"I just want to make sure we're not committing ourselves to a project, and then we find out it's costing twice as much money," Commissioner Jeff Cogen said at the time.

"Well, these are estimates," responded Pam Krecklow, then the project manager. "So I can't guarantee a price at this point."

Cogen pressed.

"Are these current estimates?"

"I'm comfortable with the estimates," Krecklow said.

Her comfort was misplaced, if not misleading. The numbers were nearly two years old at that point, and the current budget is now at $21.1 million, and no doubt rising. The county's still scrambling to find the money to pay for the construction, although the contractor has already been hired and the music plays on. If this is planning, I'd hate to see chaos.

The other hard-luck courthouse story involves the county's main courthouse downtown. It's old, overcrowded, and tired -- one earthquake away from disaster, really -- and it's already been determined that it won't be refurbished in any major way. A new courthouse will be needed somewhere else downtown.

Exactly where it will go still isn't entirely clear. The current fantasy, which dates back to the heyday of the "Mean Girl" county commissioners, is that the new courthouse will be situated right at the end of the west side of the Hawthorne Bridge -- so close to the bridge, in fact, that Naito Parkway (Front Avenue) will have to be lowered eight feet and the westbound offramp from the bridge torn down and completely rebuilt in a much more abrupt alignment. A more logical spot for the new courthouse would have been a block west, across Second Avenue from the Justice Center, where inmates are housed awaiting their appearance in court. But the Usual Developer Suspects got their hands on that block, and they're already building a soulless office tower that will sit between the jail and the new courthouse -- if indeed the courthouse goes there:

And of course, where the money is going to come from for the new county building is, so far, a complete and total mystery. It isn't going to be a $20 million deal, that's for sure -- more like 10 times that much. Rumors out of the old courthouse are that the county recently commissioned a poll to see if it would make sense to put a levy on the ballot in 2010 to pay for the new facility, and the results were negative in the extreme. Voters are not in the mood to increase their taxes for it.

Oh, well. At least the old one will probably outlast the Sellwood Bridge.

Meanwhile, as previously reported on this blog, the City of Portland, through the Portland Development Commission, borrowed $9 million this past March and handed it over to the county to move the Hawthorne ramp -- a move which all by itself is budgeted at $10.7 million (and those were 2007 numbers). If the county either builds the courthouse at the Hawthorne Bridge or sells that property to raise money to build the courthouse elsewhere, it gets to keep the city's money. If it doesn't do either, the city gets the $9 million back with interest, although the agreement between the PDC and the county does not set a firm deadline.

It was reported last week that the county is ready to get going on moving the ramp now, even though the overall courthouse timeline is still way up in the air:

Doug Butler, facilities and property management director for the county, agrees.

The realignment of the Hawthorne Bridge will go out to bid shortly, he says. Last week, the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners passed a resolution to move the project forward.

The resolution referred to didn't do all that much. The commissioners noted that "[c]urrent zoning on the North Hawthorne Bridgehead Block limits the height of development and precludes the construction of a building of sufficient size to meet the needs for a new courthouse," and they directed the county facilities folks to "begin work immediately to obtain the required zoning modifications needed to support the construction of a new courthouse on the North Hawthorne Bridgehead Block." That sounds like the start of a long process. And there's no guarantee it will succeed; the proposed courthouse is going to be gigantic, and the city could conceivably say no to something so massive right at the bridgehead.

One mystery that we previously wrote about, now solved, is what the county will do with the $9 million it got from the PDC while it's waiting to spend it on the bridge ramp move. We speculated half-kiddingly that given the tightness of funds these days, the county might use it to meet its current payroll. However, we have since learned that an agreement between the county and the PDC requires the county to place the money in a segregated interest-bearing account pending its expenditure on courthouse-related matters (or its eventual return to the PDC, which seems highly unlikely).

Looked at from a wider perspective, the $9 million forked over by the city to the county seems like hush money. The county has been whining a fair amount lately about how the PDC's "urban renewal" programs take bread out of the mouths of county programs, and the modest financial help with the courthouse deal seems a lot like a PDC effort to quiet the county's criticisms. It's ironic, though -- the city adopts "urban renewal," sucking revenue from all sorts of local taxing jurisdictions, and then cuts backroom deals with those agencies who scream the loudest.

Yesterday we saw that the school district is next for this kind of buy-off. You can't blame them for complaining. The PDC robs the schools of tax dollars, then hands some of their dough over to the county for a courthouse.

Why is this distortion of functions happening? Why are large county and school district budget items now being run through the Portland City Council and its agency, the PDC? The whole scene seems vaguely illegal, and certainly violative of the spirit of the laws that divide up our local government functions. The head of the PDC should not be calling the shots on the financing of the county courthouse, or of the new Lincoln High School.