Sen. John Cornyn expressed confidence Thursday that a federal spending bill that includes funding for a new federal courthouse in San Antonio will pass the full Congress.

The $1.1 trillion omnibus bill’s language was made public this week and is slated for a vote by the House and Senate on Friday, according to Cornyn, R-Texas.

After a lobbying effort by federal judges, city and business leaders, Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, and Cornyn helped tuck $948 million into the bill to build eight new courthouses around the country, including in San Antonio, and to finish three in cities where construction had begun.

“I think it will pass. It has to pass,” Cornyn, the Senate majority whip, said during a conference call with members of the San Antonio Express-News Editorial Board.


President Barack Obama has said he plans to sign the bill if passed. Court officials eagerly await the vote so they can renew design plans for the new building, which had stalled because there was no money for construction.

The new building must follow design requirements of the U.S. Administrative Office of the Courts, U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez said. .

“We will have a secured sally port where prisoners will safely be brought into the facility,” he said. “We’re actually losing a courtroom in the new courthouse project. As a part of budget tightening, we’re expected to engage in courtroom sharing, So even though our work needs are growing and the number of judges we have in the building are growing, we’ll make that work.”

Judges say the current courthouse, built as a theater for HemisFair ’68, is woefully outdated, has security issues and has had recurring heating and air-conditioning woes, foundation problems, flea infestations, flooding from broken pipes and contaminated drinking water.

Rodriguez said some tenants of an eight-story federal building next to the current courthouse will move into the new building, including employees in the headquarter offices of the court clerk for the Western District of Texas, federal marshals, and officers with pretrial services and probation.

The federal building houses other agencies and is not part of a land-swap deal with the city that will locate the new courthouse at the city’s 6.5 acres where its police headquarters once stood at Santa Rosa and Nueva streets.

That site will be traded for the land occupied by the current courthouse and an adjacent federal training center. The buildings will likely be demolished as plans proceed for redevelopment of Hemisfair Park.

Rodriguez estimated it could take up to four years before the new courthouse opens.