The expansion of the Deschutes County Courthouse is on schedule for completion in the summer of 2026, with operations officials saying the project is now 30% complete.

Construction crews broke ground on the new expansion in May. The three-story southward expansion of the courthouse will include new facilities, including more courtrooms with additional judges’ chambers. There will be a new entrance, expanded sheriff’s office facilities, holding cells, enclosed secure parking for staff, new administration offices and more court clerks’ offices.

Lee Randall, Deschutes County director of facilities, said that the public can expect the next stage of construction to be what he calls “going vertical.”

“Over the next six months, (you) will see major concrete construction, concrete trucks coming to and from the site, pump trucks with their large booms, and then the tower crane moving those materials around as the building goes vertical. At some point you’ll see that that structure will just kind of rise out of the corner, then it’ll reach the height of the existing building and then move a floor above it.”

Residents can expect the giant construction crane to pierce the downtown Bend skyline through the summer of 2025. The crane is necessary, Randall explained, because the construction footprint is too small for crews to effectively move materials from one place to another using ground transport.

“As you can imagine, since we’re building almost lot line to lot line on that lot, there’s not a lot of room to move around,” Randall said. “What the crane allows us to do with it being fixed in one spot is, say someone’s working in an elevator pit on one corner of the site, up against the building. They can pick something up from the loading area, move it over there without crossing the site with a forklift or some other means to move heavy materials.”

But Randall said that no one should be worried about rouge bundles of materials falling near the courthouse. It is policy that the crane never move outside the construction site’s footprint, even though the machine clearly has a larger range than the lot the county is building on.

So far the project has had very few delays and hiccups, especially when it comes to the persistent materials shortage that has been going on since the pandemic. As of now, crews have everything for the next stage of construction either at the site already or enroute.

The courthouse is still open to the public, but the entrance has temporarily been moved to be between the old 1970s courthouse and the current building. Accessible parking can be found around the rear of the building.

Deschutes County courthouse expansion breaks ground

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