Nobody, though, expected that finishing the facility would turn into a lasting frustration in itself.
Work began on the maximum-security building at Central State Hospital in Milledgeville in 1997. Ten years later, contractors are gutting and rebuilding the facility from the inside out.
So far, the building has not housed one patient.
The 192-bed facility will end up costing taxpayers about $33 million --- twice the original estimate. One-third of that will cover the expense of repairing flaws in the original construction.
The Cook building almost opened in 2003. But inspectors found several serious flaws in the construction, and then more. And more.
"The more we looked into it, " said Gena Abraham, the state's property officer since 2003, "we found lots of problems."
The fire alarms didn't work. Sensors couldn't detect breaches of the security fences. Grouting and steel reinforcing bars were missing from many interior walls. An electronic locking system would fail during power outages, slinging open the doors to every patient room.
After attempting several repairs, officials decided in 2005 to start over, approving a plan to reconstruct virtually everything but the exterior walls.
The state has sued the project's builder and its architect, alleging shoddy workmanship and a lack of oversight.
In court papers, the contractor, LPS Construction Co. of Statesboro, denied performing faulty work. Efforts to reach the firm and its lawyer were unsuccessful.
The architect, the Atlanta office of Perkins+Will, "fulfilled its obligations under its contract" and "denies responsibility for any of the contractor's defective work, " said the firm's lawyer, Bill Wildman.
State workers, particularly an engineer assigned to monitor the Cook building and three or four other construction jobs, "should have noted some of these deficiencies, " Abraham said. "He just couldn't be there all the time. There were a lot of opportunities for him not to see things."
Abraham's immediate predecessors as property officer, Lee Richey and John Butler, said they did not recall the Cook building.
"I would assume my staff had handled it, " said Richey, who took possession of the building from the builder and the architect in May 2003 while serving temporarily in the job. "I would sign 100 things a day. If it had been a big problem, or if I had thought it was a big problem, I would remember it."
The Georgia Department of Human Resources, which operates the seven state hospitals, expects to take possession of the building in August 2008.
Patients may move into the facility by early 2009 --- 12 years after the project began.
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