An unseasonably wet autumn has delayed completion of the parking garage that will accompany the new county justice center, according to officials with the city of Carrollton.

Carrollton City Manager Casey Coleman said that because of the rains of recent weeks the parking deck won’t be finished until sometime in March, about a month later than the original completion date of early February.

The project has been marred for months now by unseasonable rainfall and problems with the location of a number of utility systems. The city announced in mid-summer after the demolition of the Courtyard Square building on the site that a number of underground phone lines would need to be moved, as would water lines, sewer lines and power lines, halting work on the garage until the utilities could be moved. Even with these early delays, construction crews were actually ahead of schedule as of early October, according to Bill Wilson, general superintendent with MWC Construction, the Carrollton-based company in charge of the project.

Yet in the last month, the weather has been anything but cooperative, and while crews were scheduled to begin piecing together the precast structure for the deck around the middle of October, it hasn’t happened yet. MWC is almost finished with the foundation, after which it will receive the precast pieces, which will only then allow construction crews to begin assembling the pieces of the structure like a jigsaw puzzle.

Once the pieces start arriving, said Coleman, the structure itself will begin a rapid upward ascent, assuming that the skies stay clear for more than just a few hours at a time.

“There’s a tremendous amount of prep work before you can start, but after it’s done the deck goes together almost like a Tinker Toy. They set the columns up, and they’ll start up in the next few weeks, and once they start up it’s real quick,” Coleman said. “That’s as long as it stays dry on us.”

Originally, it was decided that the parking garage would be completed before Carroll County began work on the new justice center, as courthouse employees would need somewhere to park while the center is being completed. But last week, Alex Roush Architects Inc. and Gardner, Spencer, Smith, Tench & Jarbeau PC, the two firms heading up the justice center project, approached the county with information that would suggest it would actually be more cost-efficient to demolish a portion of the courthouse before work on the justice center is finished. A committee has been formed to address the possibility that courthouse proceedings may need to be temporarily relocated, though no decision has yet been made. Regardless of what the committee decides, work on the parking deck will continue as planned.

At 319 spaces and five levels, the parking deck will be significantly larger than the deck near the Carrollton Cultural Arts Center on Alabama Street. Though both were designed by local architect Alan Bell, the new parking garage will feature an assortment of materials not seen in the previous park, most notably cast stone. The parapets will also differ from one to the other, as the new garage was designed to resemble the justice center.

Anticipated project costs as bid by MWC are at roughly $3.53 million.