Mayor Bill Foster Gives Up On New Police Station

Mayor Bill Foster announced this week that there will be no new police station in St Petersburg. In a failure of planning, prioritization and leadership, Foster has given up on the police and seems resigned to keep them working in a stinky, leaky, cramped facility that is over 60 years old in places. Maybe the Mayor is just bending to public will since the majority of residents didn't support spending $60 million on a new police station, but there are $32 million reserved from the pennies for Pinellas sales tax for a new police station, why not build a station that would fit that amount, you know, living within our means? No, Foster decided it's just better to give up, and offer no solution at all, a tragic, yet typical, lack of leadership from our stumbling Mayor, who has mostly ignored this project since he became Mayor even though he knew about it 10 years ago.

The simple solution is ironically to do what Foster himself has suggested for other city budget items and only go with needs, not wants: Cut the emergency call center, which has been suggested before by people like Doc Webb and would probably cut $10 million off the price of the new police station. Not only would it make responding to emergency calls faster(because Pinellas county receives every 9-1-1 call now anyway, then hands calls off to St Petersburg), but it would also save the city money on the yearly budget. Next, remove the 400-space hurricane-proof parking garage from the plan. We don't have one now and we've managed to survive as a city for over 100 years, so why do we need one? The third thing to look at is to distribute some police officers and staff to other facilities. Many other cities, even some much smaller, have police annex stations spread over their territory, which helps with police response times, and this means that the central police headquarters can be smaller, and cost less.

Those are not new suggestions, they have all been presented to Mayor Foster at some point, but for some reason he decided to scrap the whole project instead. As a result of this, the Tampa Bay Times' John Romano has written another anti-Foster editorial, and Doc Webb and Peter Schorsch from SaintPetersBlog have each written their own condemnations of Foster's decision to give up the project. In the end, another sad stumble is added to the list of Mayor Bill Foster's failures, how many more will the voters of St Petersburg allow before throwing him out of office?

UPDATE: Doc Webb over at the patch posted a new article arguing for a new police station.

UPDATE 2: The Patch posts an article describing the deterioration of the police station during a CONA tour last week(with pictures.

UPDATE 3: Some additional coverage from the Examiner.

UPDATE 4: CONA's first-hand account of the police station tour.