City Marshall Tony Migues, left, and City Judge Trey Haik stand near a plexiglass barrier in the city courtroom in preparation for the court’s reopening this week. Seats have been blocked off as well, and adjustments made to the court scheduling to keep the number of people in the courtroom at proscribed limits during the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s part of the city’s preparation to reopen to business while keeping both the public and city workers as safe as possible.

New Iberia’s City Hall is ready to open up, said Mayor Freddie DeCourt, but with some changes.

“I hate the phrase ‘new normal,’” he said. “I am looking forward to when we can get back to just normal.”

DeCourt, along with City Judge Trey Haik and City Marshall Tony Migues, have been working to make the building as safe as possible for residents who have to transact business and city employees who deal with them. Windows have been installed in the permitting office to limit contact between employees and the public. In the city court, three-fourths of the seats have been blocked off, allowing for a six-foot spacing between people during hearings.

And every person entering the building is signed in, and their destination logged.

“That way, we can tell where everyone has been and keep track of how many people we have in the building,” Migues said. “We also have radios so that we can talk back and forth between the courtroom and the door to keep on top of the traffic in the building.”

Haik said that he has rearranged his arraignment schedule. Instead of holding a single arraignment on Monday morning that would involve as many as 120 people, he has broken that up, spreading the case load over Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday so that social distancing standards can be upheld.

“It’s a change, but it will work,” he said. “Instead of having one big group, we are just breaking it up into smaller parts.”

DeCourt said that the city is also limiting the number of people who can be in line at any given city office at a time.

“We will allow three people at a time in the waiting area,” he said. “We probably have space for more, but three is manageable. I wish we had the problem of having six people at a time in the permitting office, but we will fix that problem if we come to it.”

Another change that court attendees will notice is the plexiglass guard that stretches across most of the courtroom between the gallery and the dock.

“We had to make a few changes, but a lot of it was already in place,” DeCourt said. He also said the city had reopened its stairwell in the rear of the building to make it easier for people to leave, as there is a limit of two people in the building’s elevator at a time.

“I had never been in that stairwell before,” he said. “I didn’t realize how nice it was, wth all the windows in it.”