As for further exploration of alternatives, he added, “my

As for further exploration of alternatives, he added, “my guess is that after all is said and done you will like this better.”

Although he noted that, "the best of all worlds would be not to add to it . . . this addition is a good way to do it.”

Mrs. Miller said that former mayor Peter Kramer was to address the meeting, but was unable to come and had requested that she convey his concerns. "An addition in the proposed manner is an encroachment on a historically significant building. The chimneys are a historical feature which needs to be preserved.”

Mr. Kramer's other concern, she said, was that the clapboard summer kitchen which now sits at the west end of the jail building be saved rather than demolished. Perhaps, she suggested, it could be moved to the building’s north side, where it could both be preserved and also serve the practical function of screening the jail’s exercise yard.

Mr. McCarthy reinterated the concern he had expressed earlier that the building might not, from a structural point, survive such a move. In addition, he said, he could not commit to spending more of the county’s money to do that without authorization from the Board of Supervisors.

“Peter said he thought it could be moved,” Mrs. Miller said.

Sheriff John Henry Woodward pointed out that, “The last time the Department of Corrections visited, they had a big problem with tnose two buildings in terms of security. They wanted both to go - and the two trees on the street side -they wanted them to go too. We finally compromised and cut them back,” he said.

Mrs. Miller read from a letter from John Wells, an architectural historian with the Division of Historic Landmarks in Richmond, who expressed concern over the impact of the addition on the building’s chimneys.

“We agree,” Mr. Biegel replied, “that the chimneys are historically significant." The addition was de