Workshop Comments

A number of very good ideas were passed around both before and after the vote for reducing the short term costs of our public safety building. I would like to offer endorsement for several of these ideas:

Separating Police and Fire into two different buildings. The administrative staff of the Fire department can be housed efficiently as an add on to one of the fire stations in the Northern half of the City. This will significantly reduce the footprint of the initial building on the City Campus.

Which brings me to the land acquired by quick take. I believe that we have a moral obligation to return the land to the original owner. It would be incorrect for us to complete an imminent domain proceeding for land for the Public Safety Building, if we are not building the Public Safety building on that land.

If in the future we have a need for more land, then we should move forward with purchasing more land. To use imminent domain to forcibly take land that we are not using for a stated purpose would be very much against the spirit and the letter of imminent domain.

For the new Police facility, we should then build it on existing City land, here on the campus. The facility should be built for 10 years of growth and designed for expansion to 30 years of growth. It is a reasonable compromise which should also reduce the overall cost of the building today.

The new Police facility needs to contain a new Public Safety Answering Point for E911 services. The current space alloted to 911 currently should be reclaimed by the Emergency Operations Center. This should provide sufficient space for their needs.

For a parking garage, I generally agree with Mr. Berardi's suggestion, but with a few caveats. There is a great deal of urban development research showing that downtown parking garages are not an effective use of space. It would be best to put the garage somewhere centrally located and offer efficient mass transit from the central location to the pedestrian shopping areas. Please review the available research carefully when considering placement of parking garages. It will likely be viable to have several conveniently located garages each near our different large, concentrated pedestrian areas. This would also serve our long term safety needs better because we can actually split some of our safety assets between two or more hurricane safe garages.

Lastly the old City Hall land should be used to provide offices to City Services in the Future. The old City Hall building will likely need to be demolished, or heavily renovated. The land that it sits on should be used for the growth and future of our City.

I hope you take the above items into consideration when making your decisions. I do believe that each of the above options represents a reasonable compromise between the needs of our Police and Fire and the desire of the Residents of Cape Coral to see a lower cost plan for our public safety needs.