The doors to the new Duval County Courthouse are opening today for employees to finally start moving in and training in the building.

But for City Council members frustrated by a lack of information about the courthouse project, a search for answers also begins today.

“In a sense we’re gunna do a post-mortem on the project,” says incoming City Council President Bill Bishop.

The Courthouse Oversight Special Committee meets today for the first time since the courthouse failed to open on schedule. Bishop has a list of questions that he wants answered.

“We still all wanna know just how this whole move transpired what turned out to be a number of weeks too early,” he says.

Aside from figuring out who is responsible for that call, Bishop says the bigger question is exactly how sound all the last minute fixes to the smoke suppression are.

“From my discussions with the Fire Marshal, the Fire Chief and various people involved in the project, there was a lot of scrambling going on to try to make these fire systems work. I want to know what they did to make them work and do we in fact have a finished, final product or do we have something that’s somewhat cobbled together just to simply get a sign off so that we can move in.”

A final issue is the growing budget for the State Attorney’s Office. Bishop says the project started with a $20 million price tag, gradually ballooned to about $28 million- and now the administration is looking to lock-up $30 million for it. He wants to know exactly where that new figure comes from.

While he will press for these answers at the meeting, Bishop says this is just the beginning. He becomes City Council President next month, and at that time plans to really dig for answers. He says the council will audit the courthouse project, asking how the money was spent and moved around.

For the special committee meeting to be a success, Bishop expects nothing less than these answers and a timeline for the remaining work.

WOKV will continue to bring you these answers as they are uncovered. I will be tweeting live updates from the meeting on @WOKVNews.