Trione family plans building that could house family, civil courts Negotiations ongoing for a year

Vimark has been in talks with court officials for more than a year about the new building. But negotiations won't start in earnest until the leases for the two civil courtrooms occupying 12,000 square feet west of Coddingtown shopping center in Santa Rosa and family court offices near Charles M. Schulz?Sonoma County Airport transfer to the state, likely by the end of November, Mr. Emerson said.

The county Board of Supervisors voted 4-0 to start a 45-day transfer of those leases.

Having more courtrooms next door would help Empire College with recruitment for its law school as well as possibly solve a space issue related to the school's Committee of Bar Examiners-accredited law library, according to President and Chairman Roy Hurd.

Recognition that has come from the law school's top placements in moot court competitions in the past five years plus the new Law Review class taught by attorney Brad DeMeo has helped boost enrollment in the law school to 190 students, with 160 attending at night. The law students use the two civil courtrooms in the evening for moot court and trial classes.

Combining the school's law library with the county's may be a tougher sell, Mr. Hurd said. Empire is one of the 18 law schools statewide with an accredited library, which means it contains, among other things, up-to-date bound editions of case law, something the county's library also has.

Maintaining current editions in the library, which has more than 10,000 books, costs the school $70,000 a year, Mr. Hurd said. Most law firms now have subscriptions to computerized databases with the same material, he noted.

Co-locating the law library would make attorneys who have cases in Hall of Justice courtrooms cross the highway to visit the library.

Part of the deal with court officials to take over the leases involved coordination with the county on a new jail and Hall of Justice, according to Dave Kronberg, head of county General Services. The county has commissioned the architecture firm HOK in San Francisco to complete initial designs for the new jail as well as new criminal and civil court buildings by next spring.

Mr. Emerson declined to say whether the Vimark building, if selected, would be a stop-gap measure until the civil courthouse is completed sometime in the latter half of the next decade.

Counties statewide have to upgrade or build new courthouses as part of a program to have the state agency take over those facilities. However, few courthouses have passed into state hands because many ? including the Sonoma County Hall of Justice ? have seismic-safety issues in addition to security, fire and other problems, according to Mr. Kronberg.

He contributed to pending Senate Bill 10, which would allow the state to take control of courthouses without counties first spending billions of dollars on upgrades.