By Brian Eckhouse (contact)

Fri, Jan 2, 2009 (2 a.m.)

County maintenance officials thought they had solved a mystery that had long befuddled them and sickened some court employees: the source of a hideous stench and nauseating grease odor that frequently wafted onto the lowest floor of the Regional Justice Center.

Maintenance employees discovered that pieces of sewage pipe joined together in the men’s room in the lower level had not been welded, allowing a stench to spill out. Then an outside company was paid $6,000 to install access points to underground piping so that plumbers could remove blockages.

The piping work in the men’s bathroom and beneath the basement floor solved half of the problem, officials said.

But while the reek of sewage is practically gone, court workers are still complaining that whiffs of cooking grease are seeping into the reception area of the district attorney’s bad-check unit, also on the lowest floor of the building.

The grease odor, which had played second fiddle to the sewage odor, is now on its own obnoxious enough to compel workers assigned to the lobby to relocate to a room intended for interviews between attorneys and inmates.

Maintenance workers don’t know why the smell of grease — presumably from the courthouse cafe’s kitchen — is wafting toward the bad-check unit, and say its lobby will remain closed indefinitely until the cause and a solution are identified.

The county hired IMG Mechanical Group about six weeks ago to investigate, at a cost of $31,000, said Frank Wheat Jr., who manages the Regional Justice Center for the county.

It’s the latest expense to identify and fix the sources of odors that have plagued a 3-year-old courthouse for about two years. It’s a courthouse that’s been prone to problems since before it opened: construction delays, broken pipes and faulty elevators.

By mid-March, the county’s Real Property Management Department had spent $20,000 in staff hours tracking the two odors. At one point, a department worker was assigned to a desk in the courthouse’s basement to record when the smells were present.

Bernard Zadrowski, who heads the bad-check unit, describes the grease smell today as a mere nuisance, including for people who go there to make their bad-check restitution payments.