For police, a case of arrested redevelopment

Published 6:00 am Saturday, December 8, 2007

The case for a new Bainbridge Island police station was being made a couple of years before it was even the cops’ problem.

One morning in the early 1990s, when the aging edifice at 625 Winslow Way East still served as City Hall, a burst pipe from a ground-floor restroom sent what we’ll politely call “water” cascading onto the city administrator’s desk in the basement. Lynn Nordby, who after several decades of public service exuded a fairly preternatural patience, was at that moment beside himself.

“This,” he stammered to all passersby, including this editor, “is why we need a new building.”

The city did indeed get a new building – everyone except the municipal court, which remained in exile at Rolling Bay, and the police, who got the hand-me-down on Winslow Way. But even with expensive patch-ups over the years, the 1929-vintage structure is no more serviceable. Taken as a whole, the building fails seismic safety standards, while the bowels reveal patches of moisture and mold, farragoes of suspicious-looking wiring, and still-byzantine plumbing. In a downstairs hallway, a rain gutter is rigged up near the ceiling to collect and channel leaks from above – this, on an interior wall.

So it was surprising to see the administration this week boot the police station off the city’s six-year Capital Facilities Plan in favor of other projects.

While the CFP is no guarantee that a project will be built in that time frame, inclusion does guide planning and convey the legitimacy needed to apply for grant funding. Then again, a scan of the current political landscape sees the police up against heavy hitters behind purchase of the Quay apartments, construction of a new senior center and development of turf soccer fields at Battle Point.

One could look at it this way: Political clout of affordable housing advocates: marginal, but riding a wave of public sentiment and immediacy, as the pricey Quay deal hangs in the balance.

Political clout of the senior citizens and youth soccer: Formidable, and no council member who values re-election wants to tell those groups they’ll have to wait in line.

Political clout of Bainbridge Police: (Your punchline here.)

You may or may not see the police as victims of years of “ice cream before broccoli” budgeting. But the need for their new facility court is undiminished, even if it lacks a feisty constituency to lobby on its behalf.

And at some point, both the administration and City Council do have to live up to their own promises. When the council in 1997 approved the new City Hall on Madison Avenue, it did so with the explicit understanding that the cops would get their due within seven years. They appeared to follow through three years later, approving purchase of the 15-acre Suzuki property off New Brooklyn as the site. That land was later deemed unsuited for the purpose, but two more studies have confirmed the need to put up something, somewhere.

This week, no sooner had the mayor cut the police station from the capital plan than the council put it back, and it appears safe for the moment. And perhaps this is the moment.

Recall that when the council bought the Suzuki land, it vowed to get a public safety building under way in three to five years – although Nordby noted drily that in his experience with public agencies, “‘three to five’ years usually translates to ‘seven to 10’ years.”

Again, that was in 2000. So you might even say they’re still on schedule.