For Cass County leaders, no news is good news, at least when it comes to mold growth inside the vintage courthouse.

Cass County Maintenance Director Dave Dickey reported that mold levels inside the former courthouse in Cassopolis remained stable over the last four years, during a presentation to the board of commissioners last week. The results followed a study of the mothballed structure’s air quality conducted by South Bend’s ACM Engineering and Environmental Services in September.

In a report issued to the county in January, the firm found that mold growth inside the 1899 courthouse — which has been closed since 2003 — has flatlined since ACM conducted its first survey of the structure’s air quality in 2013, Dickey said. In addition, engineers were unable to detect the presence of so-called toxic “black mold” in the structure, which has been a long-standing concern among leaders and others invested in the vintage courthouse’s future.

“It is a specific kind of mold that takes a lot of water and a lot of humidity to maintain,” Dickey said. “We are not at those levels.”

The county has been
combating issues with mold growth inside the historic courthouse for nearly a decade, Dickey said.

In a timeline provided to the commissioners, mold was visible inside the building since 2009, after engineers identified several entry points for water inside the structure, Dickey said. In 2012, the maintenance department performed an air quality analysis inside the structure, which showed elevated mold spore counts — an assessment backed up by the 2013 study by ACM.

Since 2014, county leaders have spent around $200,000 in repairs and updates to the structure, in hopes of stabilizing the building to, among other things, prevent the growth of additional mold within it. These repairs included the installation of a new roof, which has kept moisture out of the building, eliminating the main reason for the mold growth, Dickey said.

While it appears the growth has been stemmed, the county has yet to fund removal of the fungi.

“The mold will not go away on its own — it will have to be remediated,” Dickey said.

The former courthouse, closed in 2003 following the opening of the Cass County Law and Courts Building on M-62, has been a major focus of the county’s time and energy over the last several years. County leadership is considering several avenues on what to do with the building, including reusing it for public offices or selling it for private use.