Don't feel bad I am a County employee and work in the maintenance department at a1890 courthouse,and I was told no.
It doesn't surprise me that the safe "no" would come,
even to employees. Reminds me of the following true story :
Our detecting club was owed a favor by the local sheriff's dept, because we'd helped them find a murder weapon that had been ditched near a crime scene. And in exchange, I .... as club president, asked them to allow our club to have a group outing at their local Posse-grounds picnic site. It was a picnic site that dated back to the 1920s/30s. And it's open by reservation only, for things like group events, weddings, rodeos, etc...
The sheriff's agreed, and the date was set. The plan was that the caretaker of the picnic grounds would meet us to open the gate, on the appointed day.
The club members all showed up on the appointed day, and the caretaker was there to open the gate and let us in. And as he did, he was a bit ... uh ... "miffed". And told me that he had a detector too. And that he had asked his superiors for "permission to metal detect there" (at the place HE WORKS AT, mind you), and they'd told him "no". Yet now here he was, opening the gates for an entire group to detect ? He just couldn't understand it.
And what was also odd was that I happened to know for a fact that this place had been routinely detected for years and years by all sorts of past md'rs (whenever the gates are occasionally opened for other purposes). So it struck me as odd that he even needed to "ask", in the first place. Especially given that he is the caretaker !
Moral of the story ?