City officials seem determined to stay on the dubious path of
building a $26.7 million
– or more – police station.
City officials seem determined to stay on the dubious path of building a $26.7 million – or more – police station.
We expressed our disappointment with the previous City Council for endorsing an outrageously expensive station. Now, after the November election that brought two new faces to the City Council dais, we’re discouraged to find that the dizzyingly high-priced project is still apparently endorsed by those elected to protect the wallets of Gilroy taxpayers.
The lack of skeptical eyes and tough questions on the part of our City Council members is more than regrettable – it’s ridiculous.
Apparently, City Council’s priorities are so out of whack that its members believe it is appropriate that Gilroy’s most expensive city-funded building should be a police station.
Unlike in nearby Morgan Hill, where less than $10 million will be spent on a new police station, we’re not enjoying a beautiful new community center. Unlike our neighbors to the north, we’re not looking forward to the opening next year of an aquatics center. Unlike the town a few minutes up U.S. 101, we’re not debating whether we should build a new library or a new recreation facility, and we don’t have a bustling downtown with thriving businesses and plenty of pedestrian foot traffic and a new county courthouse on the way.
Instead, Gilroy is planning to build a $26.7-million police station that will be used by cops and criminals. Very few citizens will have the need – thankfully – to step foot into the Gilroy Police Department’s sparkling new station that will bear the honor of being the city’s most expensive public building.
We’re not sure how to explain Gilroy’s skewed priorities when it comes to its public facilities – in the grand scheme of our community, it’s baffling. What do we really value?
We’ve watched as the millions of dollars budgeted for the police station spiraled from the high teens to the low 20s and now has passed the middle-of-the-20s mark. We’ve watched as “cuts” are considered, but no significant, cost-saving changes (such as a change to a site where a more reasonably priced facility can be built or retrofitted, or the elimination of the unnecessary and expensive-to-operate jail facility) are made.
We don’t doubt that police officers, who perform a valuable service to our community, need a new police station. But we also know that dollars are short and demands on taxpayers loom ever larger. We have an example of a reasonably priced police station being planned in Morgan Hill.
It’s not anti-police or anti-public safety to advocate for a reasonably priced police station. Rather, it’s pro-taxpayer, pro-Gilroy and pro-smart fiscal policy.
Whatever the cause of the city’s continuation down the path to a Taj Mahal police station, the only way to stop it is for City Council members to hear from voters – loudly and in great numbers – that it must be fiscally responsible in this project.
Otherwise, we’ll have a beautiful police facility that cops and criminals – not law-abiding, tax-paying Gilroy citizens – will be able to enjoy.
And the sad truth is, if the Council chooses to go down that primrose path, it might as well restore the clock tower and make sure the office furniture and other accouterments inside the building are nothing but the top of the line. After all, what’s another couple of million. We can just raise the impact fees.
