No security at City Hall, courthouse spark concern

Copyright © 2008
Gallup Independent
By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — After the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, some government agencies became security conscious.

A security desk was set up at the federal building, requiring people to sign in and out. After the new county school government building had been up and running for a couple of months, people going to see the superintendent or other key offices had to be buzzed in as they were located behind locked doors.

But county and city offices have remained without any type of security, although city employees believe there should be some security given the recent acts of violence that have occurred in and around City Hall and near the county courthouse in recent months. Once such incident involved an attack by a knife-welding transient as an employee was hoisting the flag. Another city employee was attacked by a man who punched her in the face and then kicked her in the presence of a police man as she was returning to work.

There have also been reports of cars broken into, fist-fights by people in the walkway and around the public rest rooms between City Hall and the county courthouse.
City Attorney R. David Pederson said it would “be next to impossible to secure City Hall without a lot of remodeling.”

While it has several exits, people coming into City Hall have to use the doors on the south end, but Pederson said the way the building is structured, it would be very difficult to place a security gate at these entrances.

“We are concerned about employee safety,” he said, adding, however, that security desks in City Hall would not have prevented either of the two attacks on city employees that have occurred in the last month.

“I don’t personally believe that every public building should be a fortress,” he said.

His counterpart in the county, Doug Decker, said basically the same thing when talking about the lack of security at the county courthouse.

The county sheriff’s department does maintain a security gate on the second floor for people who want to go to the two courts in the new building and the one in the former courthouse. The security arrangement includes a metal detector and a desk that is maintained whenever the courts are in session and many times when they are not.

There has been some talk in the past couple of years of moving that gate to the first floor so that anyone who entered the building would have to go through a metal detector.

If that is done, said Decker, it would be to protect the offices on the first floor, which includes the county treasurer and assessor, which have had a couple of minor incidents in the past couple of years. Decker said he could not remember any major security problems that have occurred on the third floor, where the majority of the county offices are located.

Of course, he said, it only would take one major incident to get people talking about more security, but for right now, there doesn’t seem to be any major push by the county commission or any county official to increase security at the county courthouse.

The feeling within the county right now, he said, and to a certain degree this also appears to be the case for city officials as well, is that it’s more important to have local offices accessible to the public rather than behind security gates or bulletproof glass.