A portion of Hall County’s parking deck is closed due to cracks in the top floor.

County officials say that the rest of the parking deck on the corner of Spring Street and E.E. Butler Parkway is safe to use, but the deck’s top floor will be closed for two or three months.

The ramp to the deck’s fifth floor is cracked and could cause damage to vehicle tires, according to Hall County Public Information Officer Nikki Young.

A news release from Young says the deck’s problems can be traced back to the deck’s expansion in 2002.

In 2007, engineers found that contractors did not properly anchor a beam to a supporting column when they expanded the deck in 2002. The beam later began to sag and cause the concrete slab on top to crack.

When county officials learned of the problem in 2007, “the administration at the time decided to wait and see if the situation remained the same or worsened before investing in repairs,” according to the news release.

“The county administrator at the time (Jim Shuler) wasn’t convinced it had stopped moving yet,” said Hall County Buildings Maintenance Supervisor Brett Jockell. “We had a safety assessment that said the deck was structurally sound ... and at that point we were going to come back and watch it.”

On Sept. 19, another inspection found that the county must replace the top concrete slab, according to the news release, but the county reopened that portion of the deck for Mule Camp Market, the second weekend in October.

“Mule Camp came and (the city) didn’t have a parking deck over by it. So following the engineers recommendations that we could leave the deck open, it was used a lot on that weekend but we had to barricade a safety area to make that happen.”

Gainesville’s Inspection Services Manager Larry Brown said he received a call about problems with the deck in the days following the downtown market.

Since the deck is in Gainesville’s city limits, it falls within the jurisdiction of city building inspectors.

After a few inspections and conversations with Jockell, that portion of the deck was closed again, Brown said. Though Brown said he found some “deflection” where the concrete had cracked, the city never requested that the deck be closed because county officials had an evaluation from an engineer showing that the deck was structurally sound, Brown said.

Staff writer Melissa Weinman contributed to this story.