With the opening of the new Duval County Courthouse now indefinitely suspended, the question becomes how to get the courts back up and running.

City, judicial and fire officials met today to discuss moving back to the old courthouse location, which they are now in the process of exploring.  State Attorney Angela Corey, however, hopes other options come up.

“The time it’s gunna take to move back and then move back again, those are both shut down times.  That’s downtime we can’t afford to take on,” she says.

To Corey, sticking with the new Courthouse until the problems are solved is a better option.

The priority now, however, for her office and the court system overall is to get up and running as soon as possible.  Corey says the office is already dealing with a building backlog from being at minimal operations for more than two weeks.  One of the biggest problems they are now encountering is dealing with the basic, everyday cases that often don’t even make it to trial.

“This is inhibiting our ability to keep those other cases flowing, you know the ones that can get through the system fairly quickly.”

For now, they are working on day-to-day operations like filing decisions, preparing for trials and meeting with witnesses.  Corey says it is difficult to hold a trial schedule together when there is no long term plan, but they will continue to get as much work done as possible.